Migrants, mobile worlding and city-making : exploring the trans-urban circulation and interconnectedness of diasporic world-making practices

In this article I introduce the concept of ‘mobile worlding’ in relation to African diaspora's urban world-making practices. Conceptualising 'mobile worlding' is an endeavour to look beyond a certain dualism apparent in transnational migration studies, where transcultural exchanges are mainly studied between migrants’ host and home countries, but in which the trans-urban circulation and interconnectedness of migrants’ urban world-making practices is rarely brought to the fore. A profound study of this 'mobile worlding' has the clear potential to enhance our understanding, not only of (the interconnectedness of) migrants' contributions to contemporary city-making, but also of the contemporary diasporic experience, i.e. as something which is deeply anchored in specific urban contexts, but at the same time highly mobile as African diaspora both online and offline incessantly move in polycentric urban networks along which also their urban world-making practices circulate in multidirectional ways. I illustrate this by highlighting my own empirical research on African diaspora's religious place-making in European cities, as well as by foregrounding other scholarship in which instances of diasporic ‘mobile worlding’ are brought to the fore, for instance through hip hop and fashion, but without being conceptualised as such