Bittersweet identity and polynomial design: how urban public space makes migrant integration possible

This paper explores how urban public space mediates migrant integration and belonging through the lens of bittersweet identity and polynomial design. Based on ethnographic approaches in multiple megacity sites, it reveals how migrants’ social identity and place attachment/belonging as place identity and place integration emerge in affective, cognitive, fragmented and sometimes contradictory forms. With such bittersweet identities, migrants use solitude, nostalgia, anticipation and fleeting togetherness within unevenly maintained spaces fabricated by layered power relations. Urban public space can foster positive affects through ‘de-identification’ and non-human elements. Introducing polynomial design as a metaphoric urban grammar, the paper conceptualises urban public space as composed of high- and low-order influences, proposing approaches to understand and respond to the contingent, partial and hopeful processes of place-based belonging and urban integration.