ABSTRACT
To speak of transnationality and the city is to challenge the paradigms that underlie most urban research and public policy. The term transnationality places cities within the synergies and tensions of the mutual construction of the local, national and global. It also situates migrants and their transnational connectivities fully within the forces that are constitutive of the urban . Sometimes used as a synonym for what I would call transnational social fields and others call transnationalism, the term transnationality can more usefully be employed to signal the simultaneous social-cultural, economic and political processes of local and cross-border participation, soci-ality, membership, connection and identification. This reading of the term transnationality emphasizes the concept of nationality embedded yet problematized by the term. Transnationality invokes both processes of social connection and belonging (Ribeiro 1994). Conceptualized in this way, the term makes reference to a world judicially divided into states that claim legitimacy to power through claims to represent a nation, while also highlighting the border crossing processes that are foundational to all modern nation-state building processes. By theorizing transnationality and the city, this chapter contributes to the growing understanding that scholars need to situate cities and their diverse inhabitants in multiple, interpenetrating scales of relationality. These interpenetrating dimensions of connection and identification are produced and reproduced within both time and space (Amin and Graham 1997; Massey 2005; Mitchell 2003; Smith 2001).
