Building the City: Everyday Lives of Migrant Workers

Building the City elaborates new critical insights into the everyday lives of migrant workers in cities around the world.

The book offers complementary blending of longstanding political-economic accounts of migration, gender, labour, and urban life alongside advances in feminist, postcolonial, post-structural, materialist, and more-than-representational theories. Drawing on these critical resources the authors explore the complexities of migrant’s everyday past, present, and future lives. More specifically, they interrogate diverse and heterogeneous connections between work, domestic, and family times and spaces as well as foregrounding new theoretical and empirical terrain regarding consumption, pleasure, leisure, fashioned, sexual identities, and digital lives within and beyond cities.

Premised on ethnographic research undertaken in cities across China the authors develop a detailed relational comparative dialogue with the most up-to-date international interdisciplinary research.

This critically challenging yet engaging and accessible research monograph provides an excellent resource for scholars at all career stages as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students in diverse disciplines including anthropology, cultural studies, economics, management, organisation, and business studies, human geography, planning, political science, sociology, and urban studies.

Mark Jayne is Professor of Human Geography and Deputy-Dean of the International School of Geography at Sun Yat-Sen University, The People’s Republic of China. Mark is an urban social and cultural geographer who has published 11 books and over 100 journal articles, book chapters, and official reports. Mark is author of Citiesand Consumption (Routledge, 2005), co-author of Alcohol, Drinking, Drunkenness: (Dis)Orderly Spaces (Routledge, 2011), Childhood, Family, Alcohol (Routledge, 2016) and Building the City: Everyday Lives of Migrant Workers (Routledge, 2025). Mark has also edited City of Quarters: Urban Villages inthe Contemporary City (Routledge, 2004), Small Cities: Urban Experience Beyond the Metropolis (Routledge, 2006), Urban Theory Beyond the West: A World of Cities (Routledge, 2012), Urban Theory: New Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 2016), and Chinese Urbanism: Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 2018).

Wu Siying is a doctoral student in the Institute of Geography at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland whose critical interests include mobilities, migration, affect, decolonising geographical imaginations and archives. Siying’s research is focused on Anglo-Chinese relations and the post second world war forced deportation of Chinese seafarers from Liverpool.

Wu Chenhui is a post-doctoral researcher in the School of Tourism Management at Sun Yat-Sen University, The People’s Republic of China. Chenhui’s scholarly endeavours are focused on heritage, migration, and maritime studies with papers published in journals including Social & Cultural Geography, and Environment and Planning C: Politicsand Space.