Making Locality: Rethinking Migrant Businesses through Corner Shops in Berlin

The research and political debate on migrant entrepreneurship has long asked whether ethnic businesses enable or hinder integration to local markets and local societies. In this paper, I shift the focus to minorities’ participation in making local spaces. I argue that, on the contrary to conventional approaches to migrant businesses, migrants are instrumental in creating meanings and spaces of locality for different people. I conducted 2 years of fieldwork in Berlin, Germany, participant observations as a worker in a Turkish corner shop and interviews with workers and shop owners in the culinary sector. Through this research, I examine how businesses owned by people from Turkey are central to making neighborhoods and shops local spaces for diverse actors rather than ghettos for ethnic communities in Berlin. In integration debates, local societies tend to appear as finished and stable entities into which migrants have trouble entering. This paper contributes to the heightened debates about how European societies can develop sustainable integration policies and survive the so-called “Migrant Crisis” by shifting the focus from unsuccessful interactions between irreconcilable cultures and the celebration of diversity to how minorities are integral to the daily life in a European capital.