Finding a Place in the Homeland: Diaspora Return & Urban Change in Kingston, Jamaica

Description of research project: 

I am seeking RA support for work related to my dissertation research on voluntary return migration and urban change. Around the world, a growing number of migrants and their descendants are voluntarily relocating from countries across the Global North—such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany—to their ancestral homelands across the Global South, including India, Barbados, Armenia, Ghana, and Jamaica. However, these return movements unfold within a global context marked by deep power asymmetries. Voluntary return migrants relocating from the Global North often return with relatively higher levels of economic and social capital than many non-migrants in their Global South homelands, which can generate new forms of inequality in the cities they “return” to.

Real estate provides a particularly vivid illustration of these dynamics. Across the Global South, diaspora participation in homeland housing markets is increasingly being promoted by governments as part of broader neoliberal development agendas that position the influx of diaspora capital as a key engine of economic growth. Yet such participation has been shown to drive homeland housing prices beyond the reach of most local residents. For example, in Kingston, Jamaica, where I situate my research, more than 80 percent of residents are currently unable to purchase a new home. The recent boom in “luxury” and high-end apartment construction—fueled largely by speculative foreign and diaspora investment—has further intensified this affordability crisis. Estimates suggest that between 70 and 80 percent of theroughly 300 new apartments entering Kingston’s housing market each year are purchased by overseas buyers. Despite the growing prevalence of these diasporic return movements, we know surprisingly little about how they reshape the urban environments where returnees settle.

My dissertation addresses this gap by developing a framework to understand both the real and perceived impacts that diaspora return has on homeland cities, using Kingston, Jamaica as a case. Building on insights from urban sociology and human geography, which understand place as being socially produced through ongoing practices and social relations, I theorize this process through the lens of “placemaking”. I conceptualize placemaking as being comprised of two interrelated dimensions: 1) appropriation (how places are used), and 2) attribution (the meanings and ideas assigned to place).

For my project on diaspora return and urban change, I plan to examine two key sites of placemaking:

1. Diaspora placemaking (bottom-up placemaking): how the Jamaican diaspora imagines,represents, and uses urban space in Kingston;

2. Public and private-sector placemaking (top-down placemaking): the deliberate and planned actions of public and private stakeholders (e.g., developers, policymakers, planners) to shape how urban space in Kingston is perceived, represented and used, paying particular attention to the top-down urban placemaking activities explicitly targeted at the diaspora

Given that urban life today unfolds across both digital and physical terrains, each of these forms of placemaking also includes a digital component to examine how online spaces contribute to the making and remaking of cities. 

Description of work that will be assigned to research assistants: 

I am seeking RA support to examine public and private-sector placemaking in Kingston, Jamaica. This component of the project focuses on mapping the political economy of placemaking in Kingston. To that end, RAs can expect to participate insome or all of the following activities:

1. Policy Document Review: Locate, review, and summarize relevant government and private-sector documents related to the Jamaican diaspora, and national and urban development;

2. Focused Thematic Coding: Develop and apply thematic codes to identify recurring discourses, imaginaries, and representations of space in Kingston. Particular attention should be paid to how those in power envision the diaspora using spaces in Kingston (including where they are geographically located in the city), and how they represent those spaces in documents targeted to the diaspora

3. Analytic Memo Writing: Produce short reflective memos (1–2 paragraphs) that synthesize emerging themes and insights from document analysis;

4. Digital Ethnography: Conduct exploratory scans of relevant Instagram content to analyze how spaces in Kingston are represented online, paying particular attention to content that explicitly targets the diaspora

Supervising Faculty Member: Paige Sweet

Graduate Student: Kayonne Christy

Contact Information: kchristy@umich.edu

Average hours of work per week: 3-6

Range of credit hours students can earn: 1-2

Number of positions available: 2