The current age of migration is also an age of cities, and the processes of urbanisation and mobility are interwoven: the final move from the country to the city is one of the largest migrations in human history, taking place both within and across international borders.

The move to the city unsettles a historically dominant framing of migration as a story about movement from the global South to the global North: migration is increasingly South-South. Formerly sending countries are increasingly also receiving and transit locations, and it is in cities that this dynamic is most apparent.

This seminar series focuses on arrival cities, both in the global North and especially in the global South, and particularly the arrival zones of cities. Arrival zones, whether slums or inner city neighbourhoods, are often characterised by forms of urban informality. This seminar series explores how migrants are inserted into the informal economy, how they form networks and how they claim the right to the city, how arrival neighbourhoods and cities function in the integration and onward transit of migrants, and how the formal and informal politics of these kinds of arrival zones work.

Seminars