Abstract
Approximately 90% of contemporary urbanization is occurring in the developing world. The growing clusters of settlement in Southeast Asia, China, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia present numerous local challenges of urban services provision, political development, and cultural change, while at the same time presenting surprisingly new global dilemmas. The simultaneous rise of developing Asia and developing (Sub-Saharan) Africa have provided opportunities for what I call here “grassroots globalization” and the creation of new immigrant communities for which locally oriented planners have little precedent. This chapter describes the political economy driving a new type of “twenty-first Century Urban Pioneer”, who takes advantage of the connections and complementarities between Asia and Africa that have become commonplace. Examining Chinese communities across the African continent, and an emergent Nigerian immigrant community in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, this chapter sheds light on a kind of grassroots and global immigration pattern that stands to increase significantly in the future, with practical implications for planners and policy-makers. Beyond these implications, grassroots globalization suggests that urban centers in Europe and North America no longer mitigate globalization, and any contemporary description of “World Cities,” or “Global Cities,” must incorporate an understanding of nontraditional, new immigrant communities.
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- 1.
The China-Africa Project estimates that between 750,000 and one million ethnic Chinese immigrants currently reside on the African continent. This figure places Chinese immigrants at a higher number than the number of French immigrants in Africa during the height of the French colonial period.
- 2.
For example, Ethiopia = 8.5%, Ghana = 7.6%, and Rwanda = 7.8% according to Adegoke (2019).
- 3.
It is also important to note here that GDP growth measures only the growth of the economy, not its distribution.
- 4.
Overall, the contemporary engagement of China with Africa, and in particular Sub-Saharan Africa rests upon the groundwork laid down during the Cold War, before China’s rise to economic prominence.
- 5.
In particular, see George Friedman’s chapter on “Africa: A Place to Leave Alone” to see the current arguments of the continent’s supposed global irrelevance; George Friedman, The Next Decade: Where We’ve Been… And Where We’re Going (New York: Doubleday, 2011).
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Spencer, J.H. (2021). Grassroots Globalization in the Twenty-First Century’s First 15 Years: New Immigrant Communities in the Political Economy of Asia and Africa. In: Liu, C.Y. (eds) Immigrant Entrepreneurship in Cities. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50363-5_11
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