metadata: authors: 0: author: Keith,Michael Jeremy Angus
count: World
docna: 0: docna: The great migration : urban aspirations
docty: Policy Research Working Paper
subtopic: Social Policy,Legal Products,Judicial System Reform,Urban Housing and Land Settlements,Health Care Services Industry,Labor Markets,Common Property Resource Development,Urban Governance and Management,Urban Housing,Housing Finance,Capital Markets and Capital Flows,Non Bank Financial Institutions,Capital Flows,Legal Reform,Legislation,Municipal Management and Reform,Regulatory Regimes
teratopic: Culture and Development,Urban Development,Health, Nutrition and Population,Communities and Human Settlements
abstracts: cdata!: The great 21st-century migration into
            cities will present both a great challenge for humanity and
            a significant opportunity for global economic growth. This
            paper describes the diverse patterns that define this
            metropolitan migration. It then lays out a framework for
            understanding the costs and benefits of new arrivals through
            migration's externalities and the challenges and policy
            tradeoffs that confront city stakeholders. The paper
            concludes by suggesting ways municipalities, by optimizing
            flexibility, can make migration more productive and less
            destructive in shaping the 'good city' and the
            'smart city.' There are few paths to global
            economic growth that do not run through cities, and even
            fewer that do not depend on growing the city in population
            size, scale, and economic exchange. Historically, cities
            have grown by concentrating the economic advantages of
            number and density, the social potential of innovation, and
            the cultural possibilities of newness. By bringing together
            the factors of production, land, labor, capital, and
            enterprise, in ever more recombinant forms, cities offer the
            possibility of securing new economic advantages and scaling
            them up.
repnme: repnme: The great migration : urban aspirations
display_title: The great migration : urban aspirations
listing_relative_url: /research/2014/05/19540874/great-migration-urban-aspirations
topicv3: Social Housing m1326067 2186,Personal Property Rights m1326571 1907,Land and Housing m1327648 817,Jobs m1503931 2670,Health m1504661 3480
publishtoextweb_dt: 2014-05-01T00:00:00Z
historic_topic: Culture and Development,Urban Development,Health, Nutrition and Population,Communities and Human Settlements
no_of_pages: 23
author_keys: 0: author_key: 1204803
model_extractions: WPS6879 Policy Research Working Paper 6879 The Great Migration Urban Aspirations _Michael Keith_ The World Bank Sustainable Development Network Urban and Disaster Risk Management Department May 2014
Policy Research Working Paper 6879

# **Abstract**

The great 21st-century migration into cities will present both a great challenge for humanity and a significant opportunity for global economic growth. This paper describes the diverse patterns that define this metropolitan migration. It then lays out a framework for understanding the costs and benefits of new arrivals through migration’s externalities and the challenges and policy tradeoffs that confront city stakeholders. The paper concludes by suggesting ways municipalities, by optimizing flexibility, can make migration more productive and less destructive in shaping the ‘good city’ and the ‘smart city.’ There are few paths to global economic growth that do not run through cities, and even fewer that do not depend on growing the city in population size, scale, and economic exchange. Historically, cities have grown by concentrating the economic advantages of number and density, the social potential of innovation, and the cultural possibilities of newness. By bringing together the factors of production, land, labor, capital, and enterprise, in ever more recombinant forms, cities offer the possibility of securing new economic advantages and scaling them up.

This paper is a product of the Urban and Disaster Risk Management Department, Sustainable Development Network. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank. org. The author may be contacted at michael.keith@compas.ox.ac.uk.

_The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent._ Produced by the Research Support Team
# **The Great Migration: Urban Aspirations**

**Michael Keith, COMPAS, University of Oxford**

**Keywords** :  migration, cities, economic growth, urban

**JEL codes** :  R23, R10

This paper benefited greatly from research assistant support from Nicholas Simcik-Arese.

This paper is part of a collection of papers prepared for the World Bank's Sixth Urban Research and Knowledge Symposium, October 2012. Financial support for this paper was provided by the Urban Development and Resilience Department and the Research Support Budget of the World Bank.
# **Table of Contents**

|**WHAT COMPLICATES THE MOVE TO CITIES ......................................................................................................... 2**|
|---|
|**POLICY AGENDAS, AGENDA SETTING, AND TRADEOFFS IN CITY GOVERNANCE .................................................. 7**|
|RIGHTS AND THE RATIONAL CITY..................................................................................................................................... 7|
|RECOGNITION AND BELONGING...................................................................................................................................... 8|
|FORMALITY AND INFORMALITY....................................................................................................................................... 9|
|**NOTES ............................................................................................................................................................... 16**|
|**REFERENCES ...................................................................................................................................................... 18**|

ii
The great 21st-century migration into cities will present both a great challenge for humanity and a significant opportunity for global economic growth. This paper describes the diverse patterns that define this metropolitan migration. It then lays out a framework for understanding the costs and benefits of new arrivals through migration’s externalities and the challenges and policy tradeoffs that confront city stakeholders. The paper concludes by suggesting ways municipalities, by optimizing flexibility, can make migration more productive and less destructive in shaping the “good city” and the “smart city.” There are few paths to global economic growth that do not run through cities—and even fewer that do not depend on growing the city in population size, scale, and economic exchange. Historically, cities have grown by concentrating the economic advantages of number and density, the social potential of innovation, and the cultural possibilities of newness. By bringing together the factors of production—land, labor, capital, and enterprise—in ever more recombinant forms, cities offer the possibility of securing new economic advantages and scaling them up.

To realize these advantages—in 18th- and 19th-century industrial cities as much as in today’s megacities and medium-size cities—urban growth must integrate new populations into the metropolitan machine. Urban demographic change can come from population growth through longer life expectancies and from birth rates exceeding death rates, but it can also come from a city’s appeal to people who in turn drive further rounds of economic development. Journalist and commentator Doug Saunders projects a massive demographic shift to urban areas: What will be remembered about the 21st century, more than anything else except perhaps the effects of a changing climate, is the great, and final, shift of human population out of rural, agricultural life and into cities. We will end this century as a wholly urban species. This movement engages an unprecedented number of people—2–3 billion humans, perhaps a third of the world’s population—and will affect almost everyone in tangible ways. It will be the last human movement of this size and scope; in fact, the changes it makes to family life, from large agrarian families to small urban ones, will put an end to the major theme of human history, continuous population growth.<sup>1</sup> The world is only becoming more urban. While Europe has 35 cities of at least a million people, by 2025 China will have an estimated 225 and India’s number will have grown from 42 to 68. By 2030, some 350 million more people will live in Chinese cities. And though growth in Indian cities is driven more by expanding urban populations and the reclassification of formerly rural land, the move to the city has already restructured traditional social and economic relations.

But the migration challenge for 21st-century cities is complex. Alongside the urbanization of predominantly rural societies across the world, other flows reflect changing demographics, new labor market demands, family unification, and political upheaval. In Europe, long-term demographic trends have led to shrinking cities in some areas and a demand for migrant replacement populations and new labor markets in healthcare sectors due to an aging population. High-skilled labor migration has become one facet of globalization, while increasing human connectivity has forged links across transnational family networks.

1
Political upheavals generate major forced migrations in conflict zones, geopolitical realities create transit migrations, and countless people travel under the radar of formal measurement—irregular migrations of a scale that authorities can only estimate. Meanwhile, the old growth engines of cities in the global north attract the hopeful and the skilled. In exceptions, such as Japan and the Republic of Korea, states try to resist in-migration, but strengthening labor demand remains on the policy horizon for expanding economies. So the first challenge for 21st-century cities is to understand that, while migration into cities is a global phenomenon, both the causes and the consequences are complex and varied.

# **What complicates the move to cities**

The move to cities is central to development and growth, but the arrival of migrants can trigger concerns about the impacts of migration. Indeed, potential competition for resources and opportunities has frequently translated into populist sentiment.

In February 2012, a national controversy erupted in China when professionals in Hong Kong SAR, China, took out a newspaper ad depicting incoming mainland Chinese as locusts and asking, “Are you willing to pay 1 million HK dollars every 18 minutes to take care of mainland children born in Hong Kong?”<sup>2</sup> In Mumbai in recent years, Raj Thackeray, founder of the Maharashtri Navnirman Sena, has used concerns about competing rural migrants— Biharis in particular—to drive populist campaigns and secure political power. In the United Kingdom, even after the 2008–09 global financial crisis, migration remains a top political concern, and in mainland Europe antimigrant sentiment drove both the rise of extremist parties and at times mainstream debates.

So why is this? Why do economies and cities demand further streams of migration while existing residents worry about incomers? The answer is straightforward but challenging for mayors and policy makers alike. The opposition to migration is not entirely irrational. Cities need migration: migrants grow the economy, and migrant niche economies frequently create innovation and dynamism. Some 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were started by migrants or their children. But the costs and benefits of migration are not distributed evenly. This concept needs to inform policy development.

The benefits of migration accrue in the labor market (whether defined by commuting distance or recruiting distance) and the tax base. The integration of migrants into labor markets displaces some people in competition for jobs; however, migrants themselves generate demand, spend their own money, and in turn create new employment opportunities. There is no “lump of labor” among which city jobs are shared. Most analysts contend that migration to the city will usually grow jobs and, consequently, the tax base and overall benefits for society. But these benefits can accrue unevenly. Migration’s unintended consequences— welfare externalities—become most visible in neighborhoods, where people live rather than work. In some areas, migration-related social change might lead to pressures on public goods—environmental amenities, primary schools, and subsidized housing (for rent or ownership).
But importantly for policy makers, measuring these externalities involves both normative and analytical categories. Externalities generate policy tradeoffs for municipal governance in balancing the permeability of a city’s economy with the integration of its society. As cities strive to accommodate flows of people, different welfare systems ration scarce public goods in different ways. These rationing systems are frequently controlled nationally but managed locally. Pragmatic demands on city managers often involve demographic realities that do not align with national policy principles—as much in New York, London, or Los Angeles as in Mexico City, Johannesburg, Shenzhen, or Istanbul.

New migrants’ access to health care is often regulated nationally, though the controversial 2012 flows from the mainland to Hong Kong SAR for natal and perinatal care highlighted the unevenness of national categorization. At other times, city mayors and local governments determine access to public or semipublic goods like primary education or subsidized accommodation. Accommodation of migrants defines the permeability of residence in rental and purchase markets and at times in the extemporized development and settlement of unused metropolitan areas. And so rationing and regulation depend heavily on whether new migrants are full citizens—whether they have the same rights as residents to public and private goods.

The arrival of people in a city often accelerates the growth of informal settlements, overcrowded rental accommodations, and “slumlords,” or rental sectors that exploit new arrivals. The ways that new migrants access subsidized housing, dwell in regulated and inspected rental sectors, or receive accommodation after displacement by slum clearance or urban renewal schemes all nuance the absolute costs of migration externalities with the moral classifications of eligibility criteria (box 1).

# **Box 1. Plural migrations and welfare externalities: social housing eligibility in east London**

London is a global city structured by generations of migration. Its East End in particular has paradoxically provided both extreme social conflict and ideal migrant integration. The conflict and the community building have frequently revolved around competing eligibility definitions of migrants and locals.

The white East End has given us exemplary moments of cultural fusion. The quintessentially British fish and chips emerged here from Jewish methods of preparing fish and the Huguenot tradition of frying Irish potatoes. But the East End has also witnessed violent clashes between Catholic and Jewish migrants, marked in turf wars like the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, when the British Union of Fascists marched on the Jewish quarter. Even contemporary “whiteness” crumbles under scrutiny, highlighting old conflicts between Irish migrants who built the docks in the 19th century; Irish crime families still living in 21st-century east London; Jewish migrants forced from the Pale in the late 19th century, some of whom followed Rudolph Rocker’s Jewish cosmopolitan anticolonialism; and people displaced from across Europe after World War I. From the 1970s on, migration focused principally on the Sylhet region of Bangladesh, amplifying old lascar seafarer connections with London’s docks but concentrating new arrivals in the restaurant and rag trade sectors.

Legal residents in the 1980s, Bangladeshi families were disproportionately offered the worst social housing, and the UK Commission for Racial Equality moved against the local authority for overt discrimination. Bangladeshi rights to the city were also fought for rather than given, with popular uprisings following the deaths of highprofile victims of racist violence. But as rational allocation of social housing came to the fore in the 1990s, some challenged the moral calculus that privileged either those born locally or those with the greatest immediate needs. The neighborhood, the borough, and the country determine eligibility for subsidized rental housing in different ways. How to mediate the “proper” democratic demands of “local” people and the “rights” of those needing accommodation is an intractable problem.
Many applicants for social housing were born in Bangladesh. So even after living in the United Kingdom for many decades, they are formally migrants. This raises one of the central questions in calculating migration’s welfare externalities: How do we regulate the welfare state in a world structured by global flows of people and resources? Migration’s social costs in housing shortages and ethnic competition focus on dense city neighborhoods, even where the economic benefits of Bangladeshi migration have been immense. Today, sink estates bought through right-to-buy take-ups of old council rentals (by old Jewish and Irish families and by Bangladeshi migrants) are let out to Lithuanians and Russians, and Roman Catholic school enrollment is rising again. Who has the right to demand welfare support in today’s globalized world? Whose communities should be provided welfare?

Theoretically, this might make us think about a tension between communitarian belonging and sentimental transnationalism. Practically, the most effective integration depended on three strategies to diffuse eligibilitycriteria conflict. First, strong policy planning increased the social housing supply by extracting at least 25 percent of all new private housing development for public amenity (and up to 50 percent where accompanied by state subsidy). Second, transparent allocation systems encouraged people to “choose” properties and see the results of their preference in their place on the allocation queue. Third, eligibility criteria explicitly addressed both social need and the queuing element of waiting for social housing. Such practices focus on the eligibility criteria of migrants to the city. They cannot eliminate social conflict but can enhance a sense of progressive urban change in all sections of the community.

Some cases of migration’s welfare externalities challenge the conventional measurement of its fiscal impacts. Within a static model of the city, including new migrants in the rationing of public goods increases objective welfare costs. But some policy makers, considering a more dynamic model, might argue that excluding new migrants from the rationing of public goods decreases the long-term benefits of migration, as the new migrants’ potential contribution to the city economy is not fully realized. Yet allowing newcomers access to state-financed social inclusion (in schooling, health care, welfare services, and housing) potentially undermines the solidarities of existing city dwellers and may thus have social consequences.

These dilemmas highlight two challenges for policy makers in 21st-century city governments. First, the great movement into cities replicates a standard tradeoff in migration studies. Some scholars believe that there might be a tradeoff between restricting the numbers of migrants allowed into a country and extending rights to new migrants.<sup>3</sup> In other words, it might be easier for policy makers to increase the numbers of international migrants in a country that restricts migrant rights than in a country that immediately grants new migrants full citizenship. Second, the immediate impacts of new migrants may focus on current labor demand (a static model of the city economy), but the longer impact may reflect labor demand beyond a single economic cycle and social trends across several generations (a dynamic model).

How well people sustain international connections also raises analytical and moral challenges for policy makers. In today’s societies, where both mobility and international connection have increased exponentially, migrants may sustain links between locations; “home” may refer both to places where families arrive and to places where families are rooted. As the distinction between permanent and temporary migration potentially blurs as a result, maintaining longer term transnational links takes on more meaning. In the 21st century, we are already seeing countercyclical flows, as Brazilian and Colombian migrants to Madrid and London return to the more dynamic Latin American economies, and policy debates on
marriage migration, as one demographic chooses spouses from countries of origin rather than country of arrival.

Temporal dimensions further complicate the move into cities, which often have neighborhoods and districts where several trends operate simultaneously. In the early 20th century and after World War II, we considered mass migration to global north industrial cities (for example, to the United States, Canada, and northern Europe) permanent, with declining social and family connections with the origin nation and assimilation into the new settlement site. But as the world has become more connected, global travel has become cheaper, easier, and faster, while Skype, Twitter, and Facebook can connect us 24 hours a day. In the 20th century, migration was considered generational, with the first-migration generation characterized by arrival, the second by settlement, and the third by assimilation. The 21stcentury displacement of migration paradigms by mobility paradigms—describing new, less rooted connections of people to places—complicates these dynamics. And as origin nations’ economies grow, migration networks reconfigure.

In the late 20th century, Spain, Italy, and Greece hosted steady economic expansion that transformed Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, Naples, and Athens from origin nations to migrant destinations. As global economic dynamics shift even faster, migration networks will continue to evolve geopolitically. For example, Kumkapi, a small neighborhood in Istanbul, has hosted transnational trading networks linking the former Soviet Union to its Ottoman penumbra, transit migrants seeking access to European Union labor markets, and new international labor migrants contributing to the fast-growing Turkish economy. Migration consequently both exemplifies and reinforces urban dynamism, as transnational connections inform commerce flows, local economic innovation, and labor market flexibility. Policy makers must understand these distinctive trends, whose cumulative effects structure both causes and consequences of migration into cities. Migration externalities are both positive and negative, introducing new economic possibilities and challenging the ecological balance of the urban fabric.

Compounding these dilemmas, variations in skills and affluence affect both adaptation and reception of new migrants. In economic theory and longer term social history, growing city economies need both unskilled and skilled migrants. When we calculate migration’s welfare externalities, we should remember that both skilled and unskilled migration in some senses “come cheap” to the host cities. Crudely put, people cost society mostly in the early and late years of their lives—when young, they need protection and education; when old, they need support and more health care. Most migrants are adults and consequently arrive cost-free; their origin nations have borne the costs of their early years (box 2). Highly skilled, affluent migrants can provide for themselves in the short term and have the purchasing power to affect local markets. During the economic upturn of the NICE (noninflationary consistently expansionary) decade, some 56,000 migrants arrived in London each year. But the new migration flows initially attracted little media attention, as most migrants were highly skilled, affluent workers associated with the booming financial sector, whose presence still largely determines property prices in some parts of the city.<sup>4</sup> Equally, in situations of political instability, the sheer scale of rapid change can displace the “rational” policy development of
both migration flows and settlement integration. South Africa’s largest city, Johannesburg, has 3–3.5 million people and a greater area population at least twice that. By late 2011, it was home to an estimated 450,000 asylum seekers, predominantly from neighboring Zimbabwe, making it one of the world’s largest refugee camps, with migrant presence equally distorting both policy debate and metropolitan dynamics.<sup>5</sup>

# **Box 2. Shenzhen Speed: city growth and migrant integration**

“Shenzhen Speed” captures the pace of economic development in the city just north of Hong Kong SAR. In 1979, some 390,000 people held Shenzhen residential rights, or _hukou_ . The municipal regions’ residential population are now an estimated 10–15 million. Liu Kaiming (2007) has delineated four phases of development of the city’s growth. In phase 1 (1979–85), large-scale urban infrastructure was built, driven by migrant workers from other parts of Guangdong Province. From 1983, the development of export-processing factories relied on the _sanlai yibu_ system (three imports and one compensation). Affluence focused on a local synthesis of raw materials, components, labor, and land with a lump-sum compensation. The state led the model, but enterprises linked to (frequently Hong Kong SAR–focused) foreign direct investment, ever more flexible employment policies, and an increasingly female migrant labor force. In phase 2 (1986–92), more factories and enterprises appeared, developing a wider geographic focus but remaining largely within special economic zones. In phase 3 (1992–2000) and phase 4 (2000–present), the city has displayed rapid restructuring—the factories and production systems have moved up the value chain, factories relocated, and migrants improved their skills.

Although the pattern has become more complex in recent years, Shenzhen migrants live overwhelmingly in _cheng zhong cun_ (villages in the city), where rural property rights remain. Old village clans retain much of their autonomy, negotiate with municipal government, and shape residential development, sometimes with notoriously poor-quality and poorly planned handshake apartments ( _wo shou fang_ ) where migrants live in overcrowded conditions and sometimes targeting the skilled and affluent migrants in partnerships with real estate developers.

A paradox rests at the heart of the Shenzhen integration machine: formalized informality. Rural property rights over development in the _cheng zhong cun_ have sped reform-era urban growth since 1978 and state-regulated urban property rights in the “rational” and planned metropolis. The _cheng zhong cun_ work as family-based limited stock investment companies that have effectively incorporated the massive migrant flows into the city, evolving rapidly as one wave of migrants succeeds another. But the villages are sites of informality and creativity, as well as the means of selective incorporation and subordination. Some villages, such as Da Fen, where major arts and cultural industries linked to Hong Kong SAR investment have clustered, have specialized economically, while others negotiate directly with foreign direct investment manufacturers from Japan. Yet others, such as Xia Sha, have transformed from unskilled labor sites to rental housing sites for skilled workers in local technology firms. Functionally, they serve the city’s interests. Economically, they mediate migration welfare externalities. Welfare net costs are borne by the hidden support systems in the rural regions where children are sent home to be educated, the partial and incomplete models of _hukou_ -related “city-zenship” that proffer provisional and partial membership and limited access to city rights to new arrivals. In the parts of Shenzhen that have moved up the manufacturing value chain, the villages have evolved rapidly. In some villages, old handshake apartments have been renovated for more upmarket tenants (Shenzhen-style gentrification). In other villages, the development of commodity housing has created new leasehold arrangements. In parts of the city with urban property rights, new _xiao qu_ residential complexes have created a different urbanism. The plurality of regimes of property rights has so far worked pragmatically as the municipality negotiates between the local government’s formal powers and the company structures of the (informally zoned) villages.

Policy makers must mediate short-term pressures and long-term gains and recognize the plural geographical scales of the metropolis. Successful urban migration depends on a city’s permeability—its ability to integrate new presence in an old fabric.
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The model is as useful for cities of the global south as it is for cities of the global north— because it identifies a transition through which specific interventions can enhance urban permeability. It points policy formation toward the most effective integration interventions, most notably through considering human capital and language skills and protecting new arrivals’ safety and security (in criminal justice systems and civil society).

The focus on evolving integration also suggests how urban policy making might prioritize dynamic social change within incremental policy intervention. City perspectives often differ from those of nation-states. Cities may reconcile the presence of illegal or irregular migrants with their contribution to the city’s social and economic fabric through migration amnesties or established paths to citizenship. North American and European mayors are often more sympathetic to such amnesties than central governments, keen on maximizing and formalizing the employment conditions and tax contributions of working migrants.

# **_Recognition and belonging_**

To be inclusive, the changing city must continually build a sense of community. Also, sustained links between homeland (or “diasporic”) networks and the arrival cities can be mutually productive. The American sociologist Alejandro Portes has long argued that such networks enhance ethnic enclave and niche economies in the new arrival cities and the potential for growing ethnic enterprises that help upward mobility. This model is seen across the world—in migrants from Wenzhou Province to Beijing and Shanghai; in the successful social mobility of South Asian “twice migrants” expelled from Africa during the decolonization period and succeeding in British cities in the 1980s and 1990s; and in some “model minority” Korean and Cuban settlements in the United States.

However, recognizing the identity politics of new migrations presents policy makers with further dilemmas. Religious faith commonly creates powerful social networks but can also challenge religion’s place in the public square and its framing in social policy interventions. The geopolitics of the early 21st century promoted particularly intolerant debates about Islamic structures, institutions, and symbols serving new migrant communities. The controversies around the Ground Zero mosque in New York City, the 1992 destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, India, and the 2009 ban on mosque minarets in Switzerland demonstrate how the urban landscape has become a contested arena of identity politics. City governments not only regulate and license the visible presence of new cultures but also structure their own institutions in ways that either welcome and include new cultural demands or ignore or exclude them.

Self-help, grassroots welfare, and community organizations may use migrant identities to organize religious schooling, two-way flows of remittances, home and family support, and rural-urban links, entrenching social divisions (and sometimes political power bases) between migrant groups instead of bringing them together. The social and political landscape of cities like Karachi or Cape Town or (in different ways) London or Chicago demonstrate this patterning.
Urbanism is both an inventive life form and one that regularly defies government prerogative and rational organization. Formally suppressed articulations of culture, work, and life commonly find the city plastic enough to support informal expression. This in turn broaches two further arenas for migration policy consideration in 21st-century cities. The first considers the functionality of formally recognizing the migrant presence. The second considers the possibility of planning and developing a flexible urbanism.

# **_Formality and informality_**

States often try to control migration and then fail to suppress it. In Los Angeles and New York, Berlin and London, Istanbul and Cairo, Johannesburg and Nairobi, and Shenzhen and Beijing, national governments in recent decades have at times attempted to prevent inmigration. But some essential characteristics of the city—complexity, anonymity, weak governance—enable people to avoid detection for long periods of time (irregular migration). This can create tension between city government and national government. Nation-states make policies that formalize the movement of people; municipalities have to manage and mediate the informal realities that do not always mirror the policies.

Irregular migration is by definition hard to measure. But in many cities—from Istanbul to New York to Shenzhen—migration realities, rather than policy rhetoric, structure neighborhoods. Demonstrating the tension between the formal and the informal city, irregular migration informs the policy dilemmas for city stakeholders who work simultaneously at the local, the metropolitan, and the central government levels. Informal settlement challenges how we think about balancing the rights of the migrant (particularly the “right” to housing) with the proper regulation of the city.

Particularly in the global south, some cities have settlements without clear property rights, where established tenure does not correspond with formal title and where informal occupation defies formal cadastration. Such situations demand clear thinking about the economic and moral calculus we use to develop the good city—reconciling the plausible with the ideal, demographic settlement pressures with rational organization of space, property rights with popular demands for redistribution, and formal principles with informal realities.

Policy practice and city experience are developing to address how migration affects more urban common pool resources, such as occupied or informally titled land, and how “urban land tools” affect the integration of a migrant community. Because migrants join communities that may already be tenure insecure, local groups “can be quick to abandon or change ways of tenure in the face of significant migrant arrival, because there can be little reason to continue with rules that others are not following.”<sup>6</sup> Legitimacy, a crucial component of protection against eviction, is complicated as migrant groups shift, appropriate, and alter the premises for access to land-based resources (box 3).<sup>7</sup>
# **Box 3. Migration settlement dynamics in the city: inclusive exceptionalism**

Across the south, experiments are addressing the challenges of localized urban poverty through policy instruments that institutionalize territorial exceptionalisms from specific planning regulations. These strategies target regulatory conditions that may impede the growth and maintenance of land tenure and livelihood arrangements, accommodating gradual growth through the incremental application of regulations over defined periods of time. Exceptional zoning, in some ways akin to special economic zones, can instead dampen the impacts of land speculation and planning codes to promote inclusive growth, protecting the fragile social capital on which much of the world’s urban poor and newly arrived depend.

For example, in policy critiques of Texas’s _colonias,_ low-wage migrant neighborhoods on the U.S.-Mexico border, researchers have noted a catch-22: urban infrastructure essential for upgrading a migrant’s home is often connected right up to the _colonia_ ’s edge but then withheld from most households due to rigid health and safety regulations.<sup>1</sup> Implementing a regulatory exceptionalism might help unblock this bind, to the mutual benefit of migrants and the existing community. As the _colonia_ develops, utilities might be connected preemptively. Health and safety standards might then be gradually applied in parallel with actual growth, affording the _colonias_ a more stable tax base, better integration into the labor force, and the retroactive payment of original utility connections.<sup>2</sup> Ananya Roy similarly recounts how homeless communities in the United States have occupied fully disowned properties only to be evicted on health and safety grounds.<sup>3</sup> This policy stance seems to contradict its own regulatory logic, as homelessness itself presents a de facto health and safety risk for the homeless and their surroundings.

Brazil’s Special Zones of Social Interest, established in the mid-1980s in Belo Horizonte, provide a concrete precedent of regulatory exceptionalism over designated territories toward incremental urban growth. These zones are low-income urban areas with softer planning rules to promote legalization, legitimacy, and upgrading.<sup>4</sup> Participatory local governance policies applied to very low-income districts promote occupation rules that differ from those of the rest of the city, such as exemptions in land use standards. But as anthropologist Teresa Caldeira notes, the fully inclusive participatory process may inadvertently reinforce acute social and class differences, as the powerful lobbying potential of richer citizens comes to the fore. This democratic imbalance may be described as a legalization of inequality, with poorer areas marked as illegal, rather than extralegal, by lower land use standards.<sup>5</sup> Many self-built areas of Belo Horizonte were not acknowledged until the zones were established. Integrating these areas in a planning regime lays the foundation for a longer trajectory of acknowledgment within planning practices.<sup>6</sup> What are the possibilities for learning and applying strategic exceptionalism and regulatory incrementalism to city areas with a high density of migrants? Perhaps there are opportunities for addressing the challenges migrants face to facilitate the livelihood networks that prove so essential to new arrivals. Specific planning regulations and infrastructure, if temporarily suspended or preemptively connected, can complement more social aspects of the “city as integration machine,” and strategically exceptional zones can be reframed for the commons. Perhaps we can frame the needs and challenges migrants face as a negative balance of resources, or as a common pool deficit rather than a common pool resource. In this way, legislators and policy makers can use the language of community rules engagement and positive criteria for participation.

Extensive research has been conducted on strategies to formalize, integrate, and upgrade semipermanent communities of poor rural-to-urban migrants through an emphasis on promoting rights of use, cooperative ownership, and customary land rights to protect critical livelihoods and social capital.<sup>8</sup> But when differences in national citizenship arise in urban land claims, and as tensions build between existing urban poor and new arrivals, questions around an occupation’s legality invariably surface.
Economically and ethically challenging new settlements occur commonly at the frontier of development, in marginal lands, where the state has not yet addressed land tenure, and where political instability or insecurity has undermined land tenure. These criteria fit neatly with many of the dense settings of the urban development frontier, whether in inner city slums, in land zoned for commercial or industrial use but now derelict through deindustrialization, or on the urban periphery.

In regions where major forced migrations structure national contexts (such as in many parts of Africa), international aid and service provision for internally displaced peoples or refugees further complicate rules of access and legitimacy. Unruh (2004) describes the variability in assistance migrants can receive across local, regional, national, and international institutional scales and the frequently contentious nature of this aid with regard to a resource (such as land) shared with local communities.

Ostrom (1990) highlights legitimacy and rule shifts in the commons as important for city thinking. Facts on the ground confront city policy makers with options that demand pragmatic responses, exemplified in an emerging policy priority area collaboration by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Cities Alliance to address the rapid rise of urban refugees and the still undefined need for urban protection spaces that foreground pressurized neighborhoods.<sup>9</sup> Policy thinking on urban protection spaces focuses on tenure arrangements for refugees and migrants in cities and highlights the need to think creatively about the relationship between the needs of the city as a whole and those of specific neighborhoods with high in-migration.

As the city grows, the balance among tenure, title, and occupation can push city policy makers to trade the legal clarification of property rights for the need to address housing demands. The analytical framing of the city commons can both clarify how policy makers might approach such tradeoffs and link what appears exceptional in global south cities with sustainability in affluent metropolises.

Ostrom’s focus on the legitimacy of questions that separate the eligible from the ineligible generates a theoretical reconsideration of mapping publics and commons in a city and practical possibilities for a strategic exceptionalism,<sup>10</sup> developing city governance strategies that build on a community’s self-definition through conflict or exclusion from land and other forms of the commons (box 4).
# **Box 4. Geographic scale jumping and urban migration**

Across institutions, implementing urban upgrading in informal areas, with the subsequent possibility of eviction, has led to international cooperation on the right to fair resettlement that has jumped across local and global scales. Through the increased leverage afforded by broad shared-interest federations, groups of urban poor have managed to circumvent noncompliant city and national governments by lobbying international development organizations to withhold national infrastructure funding in response to rights violations. The most salient examples of institutional scale jumping toward accountability have come from international development organizations increasingly opening channels to federations advancing housing rights struggles, holding promise for the promotion of new channels to migrants’ rights federations.

Since before 2005, the International Institute for the Environment and Development has recommended that development organizations promote the “creation of channels” to community-based organizations and federations, built mostly around community savings groups and often managed by women, to ensure that investment is implemented most effectively and linked with rights-based accountability.<sup>1</sup> The institute argues that change comes not from physical improvements but from improvements in relationships between groups and agencies leading to physical improvements.

In India, the National Slum Dwellers Federation, in combination with Mahila Milan and the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers, has organized more than 2 million slum dwellers and settlement for some 20,000 households. These resettlement schemes have been directed partly by the World Bank as a condition for transportation loans to the government of Mumbai.<sup>2</sup> More recently, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where the Solidarity for the Urban Poor Federation has been active since 1994, a new wave of evictions from Boeung Kak Lake in 2011 led the World Bank to withhold its $50–$70 million annual loan to the country.<sup>3</sup> This cooperation between local grassroots organizations and global international development organizations to lobby national and city governments builds on the advancement of channels by development agencies to dialogue with local organizers. However, some qualities linking groups in the form of federations and determining interaction between federations and the state seem more likely to accommodate effective leveraging against local governments. According to the International Institute for the Environment and Development, factors conducive to cross-scale accountability and resource management include autonomous organizations, social pressure on the state (including protest toward partnership), avoidance of political affiliation, and direct engagement with the state on collective consumption in forums that do not involve social movements.<sup>4</sup> With proper social coordination and a clear, resource-based dialogue that avoids political categorization, the right to fair resettlement that comes with any upgrading can forge a new cooperation that might even hold noncompliant or negligent national and metropolitan governments accountable for their citizens’ rights to shelter and basic services.

Given this nonaligned imperative and the transnational nature of so many federations, what are the organizational and material assets, or commons, for migrants in the city? We can postulate opportunities to consolidate autonomous, transnational federations for city migrants, explicitly benefiting from a break with the rural-urban/international categorization of migrant human rights, and thus politically nonaligned despite tangible connections to the state. Clearly articulating shared material and social goals, as well as membership criteria and rules for lobbying initiatives or social movements, helps create new channels between the international and the local for holding city governments accountable for violations of urban migrants’ rights.

While a community invariably constructs and enforces new rules of exclusion to avoid the tragedy of the commons,<sup>11</sup> “migrants can derive their own forms of land access in reaction to rules of exclusion from community, or ... from institutions that facilitate an equitable place in the local land tenure system.”<sup>12</sup> As internal migrant communities in Zambia and refugee communities in Tanzania demonstrate, limited rights (and citizenship) can enable the
development of local rules and collectivity to engage with urban land resources.<sup>13</sup> This resonates with other studies on possibilities for promoting temporally scaled regulatory exceptionalisms, as suggested by Peter Ward in the context of Texan _colonias_ for Mexican laborers,<sup>14</sup> or as an epistemological policy corollary to the exceptionalism of free enterprise zones across the global south.<sup>15</sup> To address the problems many urban governments in the south attribute (often unfairly) to migrants, we might consider a new form of zoning that recognizes that some neighborhoods have special pressures and need short-term and medium-term solutions to the challenges of migrant arrival. A sensitivity to broader pluralisms might forestall resource degradation in the city. To promote the idea of a “city as integration machine,” other controlled pluralisms might be exceptional, emphasized as possible strategies for building communities across migrant groups for the mutual benefit of the commons.

In cities of informal urbanisms, income exclusion and migrant mobility generate pragmatic and plural responses to the need to accommodate new populations. But this problem goes beyond the global south. Cities in the affluent north have long had to consider how their longer term ecological sustainability depends on integrating their distinctive parts—a mix of function, form, and activity that precludes extreme polarization and that increases urban densification and reduces its ecological footprint. Migration dynamics again highlight some unexpected continuities between the cities of the south and those of the north. Trading off the rational city and the flexible city: smart cities and the creativity of urbanism.

The ecologically sustainable city reframes externalities because it questions how we define the commons in a rational, controlled, planned city. Urban transformation and restructuring happen simultaneously with demographic change and migration. The flexible city of the 21st century will need to reconcile the new demographics of change with the old instruments of shaping a city—through planning, architecture, and real estate markets. As major urban regeneration reshapes cities globally in the 21st century, the emerging city incorporates, excludes, or displaces new arrivals and old communities.

In the 21st century, city planners and designers need to consider how to integrate new populations with old residential areas and calculate what residential markets will provide and where state zoning principles should limit or ration new residential development in realizing sustainability, formalizing land rights, and alleviating exclusion. This in turn calls for considering how to reconcile development externalities and migration externalities through the metropolitan governance structure. As we try to make the city more ecologically sustainable, we must synthesize the new urban form and changing city demographics, reconciling long-term negative externalities with reasonable city growth.

There are four ways to approach negative externalities, broadly associated with well-known economic thinkers: taxing at marginal cost (after Arthur Pigou), formalizing full property rights with costs set and allocated among those causing the externality and/or those affected (including future generations and migrants; after Ronald Coase), creating institutions that bring those causing the externality together with all those affected (after James Meade), and
building command and control systems (most often witnessed in socialist or planned societies).

These traditions inform the varying analytical approaches to externalities. The focus on experimental forms of tenure and regulation in the cities of the south is in part a return of the sorts of institutional innovation sought by Meade in the face of challenges to both Coasian orthodoxy and command economies. Recognition of social pressures on economic development systems (see box 4) logically mirrors the increasing recognition in the global north that the social costs of metropolitan polarization demand alternative ways of reconciling welfare externalities, such as new, flexible, and incremental institutions.

When London confronted its early 21st-century challenges, it had to decide how to mediate the reinvention of its poorer former industrial districts with the demands for housing and urban growth. The British planning system, with an aspiration to generate high-density, urban renaissance–style growth, promoted both social mix and zoning patterns that synthesized housing-led urban regeneration and the “value capture” of substantial social housing and public amenities through private-led development. In some parts of east London, a quarter or more of all new private housing development was passed over at no subsidy for social use, a public amenity open to borough residents with housing rights (even if they were migrants) and closer to Meade than to Coase in its response to the welfare externalities of migration. But in a multicultural city like London, this raises difficult questions about who is a migrant and about eligibility categories that prioritize either measurable social need for housing or welfare queuing for scarce rental resources (see box 1).

Similarly, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has tried to use new forms of tax credit financing to build or preserve more than 100,000 units of affordable housing, developing such innovations as inclusionary zoning and extending the term of affordability to make sure there is housing for future generations and that taxpayer investment is not squandered. New York affordability mechanisms rest on state assurance of calculable risk displacing the uncertainties of gentrification and neighborhood change. For the city’s common good, using new fiscal institutional mechanisms and land zoning internalizes the externalities of property price inflation. Along with experiments in land taxes, community land trusts, and migrant housing associations, potential institutional responses can affect the scale disjunctures of migration externalities—both spatially and temporally.

Resistance to city change inevitably prompts responses from minorities (including migrants) who oppose transformation and play the system to optimize their own positions. Writing on a case in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Simone (2008) described the complex forms of brokerage and mitigation that regulate commerce and production in an occupied modernist building. Amid an awareness of the potentially unique efficacy of a “messy site” in a city that is increasingly formalizing, everyday negotiators meet city officials to protect their ad hoc community by framing it as a “culture and leisure center.” Arbitrage between forms of belonging takes a back seat to forward-looking collective negotiations to promote the site’s spontaneity by framing it in the language of formal eligibility. Informed, complex, and strategic groups can therefore negotiate with the city government. Techniques of reframing
settlements explicitly to introduce more uncertainty into the city through dominant regeneration and planning paradigms offer possibilities for the flexible inclusion of migration into global south cities.

These examples of flexibility highlight the importance of city governments mediating the contrasting and frequently incommensurable demands of new development, incoming migrant settlement, and existing neighborhoods that will frequently contest the city’s restructuring. The flexibilities involve a synthesis of different forms of expertise—the economic hope value of land, the moral calculus of city governance, the competing eligibility demands of new and incoming migrant residence and the technocratic disciplines of city building land use planning, development control densification, architectural master planning, and ecological impact measurement. They involve innovative and creative ways of working across the old divisions of architecture, planning, and real estate. And they point to a way of valorizing the interdisciplinary synthesis of city expertise in structuring the future cities of 21st-century migration (box 5).

# **Box 5. From basic principles to policy instruments in cities of migration**

In 2007, the British government’s Commission on Integration and Cohesion listed four principles through which locally structured policy frameworks might synthesize integration of new migrants and local development:

- _Shared future,_ which focuses policy makers on becoming over being: shared ways of looking forward that recognize diverse histories, identities, and trajectories by emphasizing the collaborative fabric of the future urban form.

- _Localized citizenship,_ which stresses that status and eligibility work at plural geographical scales and that rights and responsibilities play at the neighborhood, city, and national levels and work alongside transnational responsibilities.

- _Ethics of hospitality,_ which value the stranger and the newcomer within a framework of mutuality and civility.

- _Visible social justice,_ which appeals not only to equality of opportunity and outcome but also to transparency in decision making.

The principles provide a useful framework for policy analysis. But for 21st-century development, we need to supplement them with flexible policy tools that reflect good urban management. City management works through the careful combination of incommensurable social goods, possible only when we see the city simultaneously at different geographic scales and through both static and dynamic models, synthesizing synchronic and diachronic models of social change. A neighborhood’s needs do not always align with the whole city’s, and today’s demands do not always align with tomorrow’s.

Translating these principles into policies entails recognizing the pressures of urban migration. It calls for reconciling policy solutions for the world today (as people move to the city) with those for the world as we would want it tomorrow. The principles recognize tradeoffs—between formality and informality, rights and numbers, and quantity of policy making and quality.
These trade-offs will remain challenging, but there are some policy formulations that promote a city flexible enough to integrate the scale of future migration:

- _Establish creative links among architects, planners, and real estate professionals that avoid the default development of unsustainable urban sprawl._ Cities need piece-bypiece consideration and interdisciplinary master planning of neighborhoods with high in-migration to stretch the limits of formal zoning and land use legacies that make the city inflexible. New models of land use regulation and the propensity for local actors to reinvent their own neighborhoods can be reconciled with more experimental collaborations of city professionals geared for ecological sustainability and land use densification.

- _Build innovative links between microfinance and big money for upgrading slums and improving neighborhoods_ . Cities need to harness the potential of individuals with the incentive to improve their neighborhoods and the innovations that increase the supply of affordable housing (for both residents and migrants). This involves thinking through institutional hybrids of state and private housing supply that engage in both neighborhood governance and housing development.

- _Develop experimental forms of multilevel governance that recognize, mediate, and link the priorities of neighborhoods and the metropolis._ Cities need to mediate the costs and benefits of migration by developing innovative neighborhood governance and zoning policies (normally over limited periods of time) and mitigating the migration pressure points in specific neighborhoods.

- _Harness the dynamism of the informal city and the rational organization of the formal city._ Cities need to recognize the significance of powerful family networks and gendered difference in promoting local resilience, human capital growth, community safety, and social mobility.

Enhancing the positive impacts of migration to metropolises involves developing informality’s creativities and formalization’s structures, the planned state regulation of city professions and market freedoms, the pluralization of tenure and title models, and a strong sense of both the ethnographic present and the plausibility of a civic future shared by migrants and settled members alike.
# **Notes**

1 Saunders 2010, 1. 2 China Daily 2012. 3 Ruhs 2013. 4 A study in the _Financial Times_ found that “foreign buyers spent £5.2 billion on property in central London in 2011, £1.5 billion more than in 2010, with most of the cash going to a small number of exclusive postcodes” (Collinson 2012). 5 Daily Motion 2011. 6 Unruh 2004. 7 Unruh 2004. 8 Fitzpatrick 2005; Fernandes and Varley 1998; Durand Lasserve 1998. 9 Cities Alliance 2011. 10 Roy 2005. 11 Ostrom 1990. 12 Unruh 2004. 13 Unruh 2004. 14 Ward 1999. 15 Assies 1994.

Box 3 1. Ward 1999. 2. Ward 1999. 3. Roy 2003. 4. Assies 1994. 5. Nogueira Budny 2007.

6. Nogueira Budny 2007.

Box 4

1. Satterthwaite 2005. 2. Jamdar 2003 in Roy 2005. 3. Tran 2011. 4. Satterthwaite 2005.