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Reflections on Binational Urbanism by Ryan Dewey

2016-07-18T20:59:00-04:00

Earlier in my career I was based in Chicago but I was working in Nigeria and also doing some graduate work in the summer in England.

The longest trip I packed for was 60 days in the same suitcase and it covered a month in England and a month in Nigeria.

It was a tough time in my life, but it was also kind of utopian as well because there are certain advantages to being highly mobile.

In Germany today there are 1.8 million Turks. Every year 93.5% of those people travel from Germany to Turkey at least one time, that is nearly 1.7 million Turks across all strata of society who regularly travel between cities in Germany and cities in Turkey.

Looking at the lifestyle of this population, Bernd Upmeyer develops a theory of a new form of urbanism in his book Binational Urbanism. A binational urbanist is someone who because of the practical matters of their lives spend their time living in oscillation between two different countries. This is a thoughtful book with an interesting approach to rese...

Split Identities – A Review of Binational Urbanism by Matas ŠIupšinskas

2016-02-22T11:47:00-05:00

The book is devoted to a specific case study of binationalism and its relationship to urbanity: a Turkish community in Germany. However, Bernd’s insights are quite universal. Since the methodology is clearly structured and easily replicable, it can be applied to most countries and to different kinds of communities. The author’s primary interest is the urban aspect of binationalism, but this idea evolves and more layers of the phenomenon are covered. Urbanity is still playing a big role in the book, but a much wider perspective about links between physical and cultural spaces are drawn.

The book’s main question is based on the motives behind binational urbanism and how it affects human life. It analyses why people choose to leave the cities of their origin and investigates why they decide to come back again and again. Reasons behind this oscillation are economical, but also deeply personal. So in search of answers Bernd carried out 20 interviews with people of Turkish origin of differ...

Binational Urbanism – On the Road to Paradise Released

2015-09-01T10:13:00-04:00

Binational urbanism has the potential to become one of the most interesting forms of life in the twenty-first century.

The Amsterdam-based publishing house trancityxvaliz just released Bernd Upmeyer’s new book entitled “Binational Urbanism – On the Road to Paradise”.

“Never before was the mobility of individuals higher than it is today. People work and live not only in different places, but often even in different countries. Binational Urbanism examines the way of life of people who start a second life in a second city in a second nation-state, without saying goodbye to their first city. They live in constant transit between two homes, between two countries.

Binational urbanists come from all strata of society, from the highly educated and cosmopolitan creative classes to the working class. Through their continuous change of location, binational urbanists appear to be living in a state that is characterized by a constant longing, or a constant homesickness, for the other city. The author interviewed people of Turkish origin currently living in Germany, who commute regularly between cities in Germany a...