West African Migrants in Urban Spaces: Dakar, Tangier, and Barcelona

This project analyzes the presence and impacts of West African migrants in urban spaces in North Africa and Southern Europe: how the sociopolitical contexts they enter shape their lives and livelihoods and, in turn, how they challenge and alter those contexts, raising questions about rights, membership, and lived diversity. The subjects are migrants from The Gambia, Guinea-Conakry, and Mali in Dakar, Senegal; and Gambians, Conakry-Guineans, Malians, and Senegalese in Tangier, Morocco, and Barcelona, Spain. The collective features of their experiences are compared with respect to destination- and sending-country legal and regulatory regimes, employment, housing, access to key services (especially healthcare), and the creation and transformation of local spaces. The data come from fieldwork in 2015 and 2022–23 and from multiple sources and are both quantitative (primary and secondary statistical analysis) and qualitative (archival and library research, interviews, and onsite nonparticipant and passive participant observation) in nature. To help isolate the ramifications of West African migration in the case cities, these techniques are at the same time applied to location-independent workers who use technology to perform their job (“digital nomads”) and European “lifestyle migrants” of relatively modest means who have become more numerous since the financial crisis of 2007–08.