ABSTRACT
Drawing on an intersectional perspective, this chapter explores the lived experiences of racialized, gendered, and classed mobile migrant subjects struggling with multi-scalar configurations of power—with a particular focus on the urban scale. The research employs qualitative methodologies including observation, in-depth interviews, and participatory action research, alongside multi-sited fieldwork conducted in Cali, Glasgow, Valencia, and Madrid since 2016. The research reveals the multiple ways in which the trajectories of people on the move are crisscrossed by urban (b)ordering/othering technologies and practices (e.g., control, dispersal, surveillance). Despite addressing these violent and exclusionary power dynamics, the research also presents the city as a battleground and site of contestation, where migrants navigate and contest this space through their everyday re/production practices, solidarities, politics of belonging, and future-making activism. In this context, the chapter advances the notion of the “urban grid,” revealing the multiple and intertwined spatialities that shape it through: (i) the urbanization of the border and the intersectional ways in which this phenomenon is articulated and manifested; (ii) the ambivalence of the urban (the contrast between the imagined city and the lived city); and (iii) migrants' repertoires of agency and resistance deployed to defy the urban border regime.
