India's capital since the early twentieth century, Delhi—and the National Capital Region—has attracted migrants for over a century, with a dramatic influx in the late 1940s when India and Pakistan were partitioned. Yet the vast majority of Delhi's poor communities, though still living in poorly provisioned informal settlements, are socially and politically integrated into the city's life. Why then did significant numbers of migrants try to leave Delhi when the COVID-19 lockdown disrupted their livelihoods? This talk will leverage the Coronavirus moment to explore the notions of citizenship and belonging among Delhi's migrant populations. Who are Delhi's migrants? What tethers them, what unmoors them? What meanings do they attach to the city and to home? What can we learn from this moment to create a world of justice and opportunity for all?

About the speaker
Mukta Naik is an architect and urban planner, currently a Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, India. She has worked as a planner in the affordable housing sector, and her current research lies at the intersections of migration and urbanization, with a focus on housing, governance, and planning. She has published widely in academic and popular publications and is currently a PhD researcher at the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Today, Hong Kong presents itself as the capital of Asia. One objective of the marketing strategy of the city's Brand Hong Kong program is to maintain cultural diversity and a global network of people in a multicultural society. Migration studies and literature are on the rise. In recent years, there has been a growing concern about migrants' rights and livelihoods. In response to the growing number of migrants, the Hong Kong government has implemented various laws, policies, and arrangements. Terence Shum will analyze the Hong Kong migration landscape since the 1980s and discuss three major migration patterns, including labor migration, refugee migration, and education and elite migration. He will look at how the policies and arrangements affect the experiences of different migrant groups during their integration, how migrants adopt various strategies to cope with their everyday life challenges, and how the image of Hong Kong as a city of migration has transformed over decades.

About the speaker
Terence Shum is Research Assistant Professor in the School of Arts and Social Sciences and Research Fellow in Public and Social Policy Research Centre at The Open University of Hong Kong. He is a development anthropologist whose ethnographic interests lie in Asia, particularly with migrants in Hong Kong, China, and Thailand. His research interests cover international migration and refugee studies, inequality and ethnicity, globalization, and multiculturalism. He is the author of Asylum-seeking Journeys in Asia: Refugees in Hong Kong and Bangkok (Routledge, 2019). His current writing project is entitled The African Diaspora in Hong Kong: Migration Journeys, Identity and Home.

How do labor migrants live in Moscow? We have got used to seeing workers from Central Asia and the Caucasus cleaning the streets, offices and shopping malls, and renovating buildings. Recently, we have been seeing a growing number of couriers doing food deliveries, and many among them are migrants. During the pandemic, those couriers have become the main suppliers of food in Moscow. Although we use their services and could hardly imagine our city's life without them, we hardly know anything about their life. Ekaterina Demintseva will present the results of a research project carried out by the National Research University Higher School of Economics over the past few years. Listeners will find out where labor migrants live, whether they come with families, what schools their children attend, what they do in case they fall ill and how they spend their weekends, and why, despite their visibility in the city, we hardly know anything about migrants.

About the speaker
Ekaterina Demintseva is the head of the Centre for Qualitative Social Policy Research at the Institute for Social Policy of by the National Research University Higher School of Economics and associate professor at the University's School of Cultural Studies.

Kira Kosnick's lecture on Berlin will link the city's migration history to its turbulent political history, going back to the early twentieth century, its role as the political and ideological center of Nazi Germany, and its postwar division. She will argue that in order to understand how migrants have been integrated and excluded in Berlin and German society/ies, it is necessary to understand both the changes in the approach to citizenship and the function of cities as points of arrival and transit in global networks.

About the speaker
Kira Kosnick is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Europa-University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. After obtaining a PhD at the New School for Social Research, New York, she has worked in Great Britain and Germany as a sociologist, cultural analyst, and anthropologist, combining her expertise in migration studies with an interest in urban studies and working on the intersections of migration, gender, racism, and sexuality in urban environments.

The lecture is organized in collaboration with CISR e.V. Berlin

London is a multicultural city, but this status can be fragile, and even in a multicultural city, many people remain excluded from the mainstream. The mission of the Counterpoints Arts project is to support and produce the arts by and about migrants and refugees, seeking to ensure that their contributions are recognized and welcomed within British arts, history, and culture. Drawing on the beliefs and values of the project and examples from artists Counterpoints Arts have commissioned, Almir Koldzic will discuss the role the arts play in questioning and imagining different ways of how we can live together. Artists and creative practitioners that Counterpoints Arts work with do this by exploring people's everyday experiences, challenges, histories, dreams, and aspirations, helping make visible and audible what's often invisible or silent.

About the speaker
Almir Koldzic is Co-Founder and Director of Counterpoints Arts. The focus of his work to date has been on developing creative and collaborative strategies for engaging with refugee and migrant experiences. His experiences include leading on the development of a national strategy and identity for Refugee Week UK; initiating the Simple Acts participatory program; developing Platforma—a national arts and refugees networking project; curating and producing events, exhibitions, and commissions; and developing lasting partnerships with a significant number of organizations, ranging from mainstream cultural organizations and inter/national NGOs to smaller arts organizations and community groups. His passion is literature. He has studied English literature (BA), Anthropology (MA), and Creative Writing.

Rapid urbanization and modernization processes under global conditions lead non-Western cities like Istanbul to be transformed and become gigantic urban areas. In these cities, where there is a considerable demand for workers from both upper and lower segments, migrants settle in different parts of the city according to their profiles. In general, migrants reproduce existing segregation patterns of cities by locating in neighborhoods where the local residents are similar to themselves in terms of their socio-demographic attributes. The lecture will present residential segregation patterns of internal and international migrants in Istanbul with reference to the city's development process, briefly introduce the existing literature on the social networks of migrants and discuss a case study on local and nonlocal social networks of a specific group of internal and international migrants.

About the speaker
Bürge Elvan Erginli is a project coordinator at TESEV on data-based urban policy-making. She studied Urban and Regional Planning at Istanbul Technical University and worked as a researcher in the Social and Economic Geography section of the urban exhibition Istanbul 1910–2010, which was organized as part of the 2010 European Capital of Culture at Santral Istanbul.

The music of Java is a style that is believed to have emerged in 1925 and, with the help of American cinema, has come to be seen as "the real music of Paris." The very opposite of the strict waltz, it came from the criminal circles or the poor neighborhoods. Java developed from mazurka, blended the folk music of Auvergne with gypsy rhythms, and was played on the accordion, which is an Italian musical instrument. The complex history of the genre is a reflection of the hidden history of Paris that dates back to the nineteenth-century renovation project of Baron Haussmann, which pushed the poor and the gypsies to the outskirts of Paris and made the city attractive for workers from France and abroad. People who were displaced from the center settled in slums, settlements, and improvised blocks around the city: the periphery that gave rise to what would become the culture of the city, appropriated by the center, and bringing millions of tourists to Paris. Stany Cambot will trace the history of this cultural phenomenon from the renovation of Baron Haussmann to today's Paris agglomeration created by the worldwide process of metropolization. He will discuss how spontaneous movements of population are inseparable from contemporary urban planning and how, against all logic, the economic and urban planning project that creates the city's periphery, tries to destroy it.

About the speaker
Stany Cambot is an architect, interdisciplinary artist, scenographer, and researcher of urban minorities. In 1998 he founded Échelle Inconnue, a research and creative project that studies alternative and emerging forms of urban life and communities excluded from research or discriminated against for their alternative lifestyle (immigrants, Roma, homeless and nomadic people). He has contributed to many academic publications and is the author of Villes Nomades, histoires clandestines de la modernité [Nomadic Cities: The Hidden History of Modernity], and the maker of the documentary film Blouma. Since 2015, he has been researching informal construction in the post-Soviet space (garage co-ops, markets, kiosks, and stands) as well as the life of migrants in the city at the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences.

The lecture is organized in collaboration with French Association D'EST

More than any other city, New York has been characterized by a quasi-constant flow of immigrants. Immigration cannot be dissociated from the city's history and has created an openness and diversity, unique amongst global metropolises. The recent coronavirus pandemic that has hit New York City particularly hard, has brought to surface the role of immigrants in New York, their critical contributions and heightened vulnerabilities. The talk will provide a brief historical perspective of immigration in New York and focus on contemporary migration, its distinctive characteristics, and the challenges and opportunities that the city and its immigrant communities are set to face in the post-COVID-19 era.

About the speaker
Achilles Kallergis is Director of the Cities and Migration Project at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility. In this role, he coordinates the Research Platform on Cities, Migration and Membership—a collaboration of The New School and fifteen research institutions from around the world. His research focuses on urbanization, migration, and mobility in rapidly growing cities. Specifically, it explores how locally-generated data can provide new evidence on mobility patterns and contribute to improving living conditions in low-income urban settings through better provision of housing and services.