No. 15 (2022): Migrations and configurations of urban habitat: views from Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula

International and internal migrations from the countryside to the city have historically been the main forms of growth in cities, as well as an important factor in the dynamization and transformation of the urban environment both in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. Nowadays, migratory processes continue to frame multiple patterns of mobility of people, capital and goods, which generate a direct impact on the urban landscape. On one side, the incorporation of migrant populations poses specific challenges to residential coverage, infrastructure planning and governance at a municipal level; on the other side, their presence is translated into new forms of appropriation, delimitation and functional definition of space, which are negotiated in the need to accommodate each other and with other pre-existing ones; finally, they participate on a daily basis in multiple relationships in the host society, but they also reproduce in the distance others that thus enable the emergence of broad and dense transnational networks or plurilocal movements at the national and transnational level. The study of migratory processes thus invites us to reflect on a diversity of problems in relation to the following questions: the types of urban habitat generated by migrations; the new urban cartographies traceable in the practices of migrants; strategies for labor and residential insertion in the city; the experiences of construction and negotiation of ethnic, gender and class identities among migrants; the new forms of linking with the urban environment in a “here” and a “there” that points to phenomena such as transnationalism, plurilocality and rural-urban dynamics at different territorial scales.

This issue aims to promote a debate around these issues as well as other related issues that connect with migration processes and their impact on the urban environment, taking as empirical references the cities of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. We invite authors interested in the subject to send their own original contributions.