Abstract

This paper is about the city as home for people living in diaspora. It is part of a broader attempt to think about the relationships between homes and cities in terms of both urban domesticities (home-making in the city) and domestic urbanism (the city itself as home). It develops two key areas of debate. First, in contrast to research that explores diasporic homes in relation to domestic home-making and/or the nation as home or ‘homeland,’ it foregrounds the diaspora city as home. Second, building on research on transnational urbanism, translocality and the importance of the ‘city scale’ in migration studies, it argues that the city is a distinctive location of diasporic dwelling, belonging and attachment. The paper considers what it means to be at home in a diaspora city by drawing on two research projects: first, the urban attachments of Anglo-Indian and Chinese Calcuttans who live in London and Toronto; and, second, the relationships between home and the city for diaspora communities in East London.