Labour migration as a temporal practice in peripheral cities

Abstract

Comăneşti, a small town in Romania’s Moldova region, has been significantly affected by migration to Western Europe over the last decades. Yet, the development of the city cannot fully be grasped with the notion of ‘shrinking’. As migration is often temporary and as migrants maintain multiple ties with their place of origin, they rather forge a specific temporality of urban development that is shaped by rhythms of absence and presence; that is oriented towards future returns; and that echoes the cycles of transnational labour markets as well as immigration policies of destination countries. This paper, on the one hand, shows how the temporality of Comăneşti is constituted and stabilised by temporal facets of labour migration practices. On the other hand, the paper illustrates how Comăneşti’s temporality infra-structures the economic and social life of the city and materialises in its urban space. In so doing, the paper does not only seek to contribute to the debate on time, urban development, migration and peripherality by turning to the ‘departure cities’ of transnational migration, but also seeks to advance the idea of ‘time as infrastructure’ by illustrating how it is maintained and reproduced in practice.

Key words:

• migration
• temporality
• urban development
• periphery
• post-socialism

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ruth Coman

Ruth Coman is an Urban Planner, Designer and Researcher Based in Bucharest and Cluj-Napoca. Email: [email protected]

Monika Grubbauer

Monika Grubbauer is Professor for History and Theory of the City at HafenCity University Hamburg. Email: [email protected]

Jonas König

Jonas König is a Researcher in Urban and Regional Economics at Technical University Berlin. Email: [email protected]