City Makers and the Politics of Urban Diversity Governance

This open access book examines the rising challenges of managing diversity in European and Asian cities. It spotlights the roles of varied city makers - from urban leaders to migrant communities and civil society activists - in negotiating and transforming their city’s diversity governance. The book brings together the contributions of urban studies and migration studies scholars, which offer rich empirical analyses on various European and Asian cities, such as Paris, Singapore, Barcelona, and Guangzhou. Adopting a comparative lens, the book presents a decentered understanding of 'super-diverse' cities, examining shifts in urban policy-making within different geographical contexts, with distinct patterns of migration and diversification. By advancing urban comparison as a research tool, it contributes to the contemporary discussions on the local turn of migration and diversity policies.

Jérémie Molho is Senior Research Associate at the Canada Excellence Chair in Migration and Integration Program at Toronto Metropolitan University. His research focuses on the intersections of migration, urban change, and cultural governance in global cities. From 2023 to 2025, he has been Principal Investigator of Fostering Integration Through the Arts, a project exploring how community arts support newcomer integration in Toronto. Since 2024, he also has been leading Highly Skilled Migration in Global Cities, a SSHRC-funded study of the evolving motivations and experiences of hypermobile professionals across diverse urban contexts such as Istanbul, Doha, Singapore, and Toronto. He holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Angers and has held research positions at the European University Institute in Florence, and the National University of Singapore.
Marie Gibert-Flutre is Associate Professor of Geography in the Department of East Asia Studies (LCAO)/CESSMA, at the Universiteì Paris Cité. Her research deals with the dynamics of public and private spaces in the production and appropriation of urban space in Asia. By critically exploring ‘global Asia’ from ordinary public spaces and neighborhoods, she turns in particular the traditional approach to ‘global cities’ upside down and contributes to a renewed conception of metropolization as a highly situated process, where forces at play locally are both intertwined and labile. As Principal Investigator, she currently manages the Ho Chi Minh City case study of the International SEANNET 2 (Southeast Asia Neighborhoods Network) research program: Communities of Learning, Research and Teaching Collaborative (funded by the Henry Luce Foundation). She has recently published the following books: Les envers de la métropolisation: Les ruelles de Ho Chi Minh Ville (Vietnam) (CNRS Edition, 2019) and Asian Alleyways: An Urban Vernacular in Times of Globalization (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), co-edited with Heide Imai.
K. C. Ho is currently Head of Urban Studies at the Yale-NUS College, National University of Singapore. Trained as an urban sociologist at the University of Chicago, his research interests are in the political economy of cities, higher education, and youth. Recent higher education studies publications include “Internationalization and Education-Related Mobility in Asia-Pacific Universities” Oxford Handbook of Higher Education in the Asia-Pacific Region 2023, (first author), “Student mobilities in a contagion: (Im)mobilising higher education?” Geographical Research, 2021 (Ravinder Sidhu as first author), and “Conceptualizing the second education circuit for China's doctoral students in Asia”, International Journal of Chinese Education, 2020 (Yun GE as first author).