On the Work of Urbanization: Migration, Construction Labor, and the Commodity Moment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Construction labor markets are crucial to processes of urbanization, yet they have been largely overlooked as sites for research and theory at the nexus of urban and migration studies. In this article I explore how widespread trends of flexibility have transformed construction labor markets internationally in recent decades and highlight how these trends intersect with the growing incorporation of temporary migrant labor. Employing research conducted on construction labor markets in the city of Dubai, I offer three interventions on theorizing urbanization through the lens of migrant construction work and employment. These include reconceptualizing urbanization as a process of commodity production; highlighting the building process as a site of intersectional politics; and foregrounding how migrant construction work and employment offers a fruitful lens for comparative urban research seeking to draw new connections about the social relations of urbanization across a host of cities internationally. Drawing on feminist migration and postcolonial urban scholarship, I consider how an engagement with the commodified geographies of migrant construction work offers opportunities to reframe and decenter Marxian theories of urbanization.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".