Making cities in drylands : Migration, livelihoods, and policy

• Throughout history, urban centres have existed at the margins of drylands. Nowadays they are expanding in connection to new local, national, and global contexts. Rich research on the urbanization–migration relationship, especially in Africa and Asia, has not given much attention to dryland cities, while emerging research suggests that climate change effects entangled with conflicts in resource use are driving or displacing people to dryland cities. Drawing on livelihoods and translocal perspectives that centralize human agency in (re)producing places and shaping relations between places through migration/mobilities, this chapter explores the driving forces behind the growth of dryland cities and the contribution of rural–urban migration to this process. Our two empirical cases—Khartoum in Sudan and Inner Mongolia in China—demonstrate that dryland cities have been produced simultaneously through migrants’ bottom-up actions, changing human–environment relationships, and shifting policy. Urban growth in drylands is nurtured by resources in the rural area through the mediation of migrants, which calls for research to look beyond the urban–rural dichotomy. Despite following some general characteristics and development directions, the dynamics of dryland cities are shaped by particular environmental and geographical characteristics of the drylands, which are associated with rural migrants’ more flexible and opportunistic but less settled relationships to the cities.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Social och ekonomisk geografi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Social and Economic Geography (hsv//eng)

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