Migrant entrepreneurs and urban cultural economy in Sydney, the ‘City of Villages’: Haymarket's ‘Chinatown’ and Leichhardt's ‘Little Italy’

Life stories of small business entrepreneurs provide significant insights for the understanding of transnational processes as well as nuanced representations of city cultures. In this chapter, I delve into the relationship between migration and urban spaces, and discuss the experience of a number of entrepreneurs by analysing how their desires, ambitions and life-trajectories have been mediated by the urban restructuring of Sydney, Australia. This happens at a time when the governmentality strategies adopted in the city have increasingly relied on neighbourhood-based economic revitalisation projects that are predicated upon the provision of culture and that have been translated into the creation of spatially demarcated places – the precincts. Here, urban consumers can expect to enjoy specific ‘flavours’, prominent among which is ‘ethnic culture’. Contemporary migration in Sydney, so I argue in this chapter, is heavily influenced by this type of urban reconfiguration agendas, as the precincts represent platforms upon which conjunctural narratives of identity formation take place at a time in which ‘providing ethnicity’ becomes an opportunity on the road to migrants’ emplacement. In this context, deep ethnographic explorations of the place of arrival of migratory movements offer possibilities to understand how migrant entrepreneurs selectively appropriate parts of their complex identities, switch between forms of identification or assume alternative identities altogether. The adaptations on the urban fabric of the city's economy, in other words, are introduced here as active components of the subjectivity-making processes and professional experiences that characterise contemporary transnational migration in the city. This view acknowledges places and identities as co-constitutive elements; moreover, it highlights the pitfalls of the use of analytical lenses such as the ‘ethnic entrepreneur’, which often risks to brush aside the dynamic meaning of ethnicity and the nuanced relations between identities and places.