Below is the conference panel that Dr. Andre Ortega and I co-organized at the 2025 American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in Detroit. Many thanks to Dr. Michelle Buckley for serving as discussant and to the participants for engaging in thoughtful discussions on transnational urbanism in the Global South.

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Organizers: Siddharth Menon, University of Wisconsin-Madison & Dr. Andre Ortega, Syracuse University

Discussant: Dr. Michelle Buckley, University of Toronto-Scarborough

Participants:

• Siddharth Menon, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Dubai Diasporas, Transnational Remittances, and Infrastructures of Finance in India”
• Maritza Cristina García Pallas, KU Leuven: “Tourism-Led Transnational Housing Investment and Heritage Rehabilitation in Havana”
• Dr. Aurelie Varrel, Centre National de Recherche Scientifique: “‘NRIs in the City’ reloaded: Which city(ies)? Bringing further the transnational urbanism research agenda”
• Dr. Marta Bivand Erdal, Peace Research Institute Oslo: “Transnational housing investment revisited”
• Janet Husunukpe, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: “Navigating Urban Transitions: Tourism-Driven Housing Investment in Ghana’s ‘Year of Return.’

Panel Abstract: Remittances are back. After experiencing a dip during the COVID-19 pandemic years, transnational remittance flows, typically understood as the transfer of money by migrant workers employed in high-income “destination” countries to friends and family in their low and middle-income “source” countries, has witnessed a sharp spurt from US$445 billion in 2020 to US$857 billion in 2023, and are expected to growth even further in the coming years (Ratha et al. 2024). These intimate and intra-household flows of money significantly trump top-down institutional flows of money into low and middle-income countries, like Official Development Assistance and Foreign Direct Investments, and thus have been long heralded by development sector actors as key avenues of poverty alleviation and development in the Global South. Importantly, a significant portion of remittances are invested in housing construction, as witnessed in the countless “remittance houses” (Boccagni and Erdal 2021) spread across prominent remittance receiving regions of the world. They are an important mode through which urban space is produced in much of the Global South.

Things have changed recently. A few decades of high economic growth in Global South countries have given them a small, but disproportionately influential, demographic of middle-class and elite transnational migrants who are altering remittance investment patterns. Scholars have documented how such Global South migrants are investing remittances in urban development projects back home for capital accumulation, in the Philippines (Ortega and Katigbak 2022; Banta 2024), India (Menon 2024; Varrel 2020; Bose 2014), Pakistan (Erdal 2012), Tanzania (Mercer 2024), Zimbabwe (McGregor 2014), Mexico (Lopez 2014), Colombia (Zapata 2018), Trinidad and Tobago (Conway and Potter 2012), and Cuba (Wijburg et al. 2021), creating new rounds of uneven urban development. Recent observations have also indicated how such migrants have now begun investing money, which they would have otherwise remitted home, into urban development projects in high and middle-income “destination” countries. Yet not enough is known about these new patterns of “transnational urbanism” (Smith 2000).

In this hybrid paper session, we aim to examine new patterns of “transnational urbanism”, broadly construed. We invite papers that speak across world regional and disciplinary boundaries and address emerging themes on the subject. These include, but are not limited to:

• Urban development in low and middle-income countries financed by transnational migrants
• Urban development in high-income countries financed by transnational migrants
• Financialization of remittances for elite urban development
• Diverse forms of housing and real estate development driven by migration patterns
• The logics and rationales of elite transnational actors
• The role of transnational private real estate developers
• The role of state actors across transnational remittance corridors
• Local resistance to elite transnational urbanism
• International students as producers of high-end urban space
• Growth of short-term rentals
• Shifting South-South regional interdependencies
• New understandings of remittance flows and remittance-induced development
• Shifting relationship between remittances and capital

References

Banta, V.L. (2024) ‘Making the hard sale: Migrant sales agents and the precarious labours of Philippine

real estate brokerage’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space.

Boccagni, P. and Erdal, M.B. (2021) ‘On the theoretical potential of “remittance houses”: toward a

research agenda across emigration contexts’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 47(5), pp.

1066–1083.

Bose, P.S. (2014) ‘Living the Way the World Does: Global Indians in the Remaking of Kolkata’, Annals

of the Association of American Geographers, 104(2), pp. 391–400.

Conway, D. and Potter, R.B. (2012) ‘Transnational Urbanism in Port of Spain: Returning Middle-Class

Urban Elites’, Urban Geography, 33(5), pp. 700–727.

Erdal, M.B. (2012) ‘“A Place to Stay in Pakistan”: Why Migrants Build Houses in their Country of

Origin’, Population, Space and Place, 18(5), pp. 629–641.

Lopez, S.L. (2014) The Remittance Landscape: Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA.

 Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Mercer, C. (2024) Suburban Frontier: Middle-Class Construction in Dar es Salaam. Oakland, California:

University of California Press.

McGregor, J. (2014) ‘Sentimentality or speculation? Diaspora investment, crisis economies and urban

transformation’, Geoforum, 56, pp. 172–181.

Menon, S. (2024) From Gulf Houses to NRI Flats: On Kochi’s ‘World-Class’ Urban Transformation, Ala

 / അല. https://alablog.in/issues/68/gulf-houses-to-nri-flats/

Ortega, A.A.C. and Katigbak, E.O. (2022) ‘Transnational urbanism in the South’, in Handbook on

Transnationalism. Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 211–229.

Ratha, D., Chandra, V., Kim, E. J., Plaza, S. and Mahmood, A. (2024) ‘Remittances Slowed in 2023,

Expected to Grow Faster in 2024’, World Bank KNOMAD, Washington, DC.

Smith, M.P. (2000) Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization. Malden, Mass: Wiley-Blackwell.

Varrel, A. (2020) ‘A job in Dubai and an apartment in Bangalore’, City, 24(5–6), pp. 818–829.

Wijburg, G., Aalbers, M.B. and Bono, F. (2021) ‘Cuban migrants and the making of Havana’s property

market’, Urban Geography, 42(9), pp. 1362–1387.

Zapata, G.P. (2018) ‘Transnational migration, remittances and the financialization of housing in

Colombia’, Housing Studies, 33(3), pp. 343–360.