Key Issues of Female Migration, Urban Relocation and Remaking Home

This policy report is complementary to the ethnographic project ”Women of the World: Home and Work in Barcelona”, carried out by the United Nations University, Institute on Globalization, Culture and Mobility (UNU-GCM). The project aims to explore key aspects of migration, relocation and settlement in an urban context with a specific gender focus by means of oral and visual documentation. This policy report will give more attention to related women’s migration topics, as well as concepts that are underexposed in (female) migration literature, both on the process of relocation as well as on the process of settlement. Firstly, a broad explanation on the feminization of migration, women in transnational communities and the concept of remaking home is given. Secondly, we explore the social aspects of relocation and settlement by providing an overview of opportunities and challenges for women as they attempt to rebuild a home in an unknown city and try to integrate in the community. We will give a background in academic literature, provide a short overview of existing supranational literature and connect the existing knowledge to the oral documentation collected in the “Women of the World” project. To further make the link with this project, we also present Barcelona as a city of migration, with specific attention to the “Interculturality Plan” and the “Anti-Rumour campaign”. The report concludes by presenting several policy recommendations to better understand the social aspects of remaking home in the city and so promote the integration of female migrants within host societies.