This article is about the city as home for people living in diaspora. We develop two key areas of debate. First, in contrast to research that explores diasporic homes in relation to domestic homemaking and/or the nation as home or 'homeland', we consider the city as home in diaspora. Second, building on research on transnational urbanism, translocality and the importance of the 'city scale' in migration studies, we argue that the city is a distinctive location of diasporic dwelling, belonging and attachment. Drawing on interviews with Anglo-Indian and Chinese Calcuttans who live in London and Toronto, we develop the idea of 'diaspora cities' to explore the importance of the city as home rather than the nation as 'homeland' for many people living in diaspora. This leads to an understanding of the importance of migration and diaspora within cities of departure as well as resettlement, and contributes a distinctively diasporic focus to broader work on comparative urbanism.

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We were sitting in the living room, warming up and drying out with some hot tea, when suddenly a hatch opened and a Somali man popped his head out. He beckoned us onto the balcony and, gesturing towards the council estate around us, described his beautiful garden in Somalia and all the things that grew there. He was the first of five characters we would meet over the next hour as we explored three empty flats in Shelmerdine Close, Bow, that had been transformed into the homes of Polish, Kurdish, Somali and Vietnamese migrants to London, in London Bubble's performances of 'My Home'. Through these spaces and the verbatim re-telling of stories gathered in interviews, we learned what home meant to different people. From his leather armchair in a richly red room, a Polish man and two friends talked about home as invoking a feeling of comfort. Over tea and biscuits, and amidst piles of boxes, a Polish woman shared memories of the orange carpet in her childhood home. The Somali man then came back to take us into his living room, where we watched and listened as he fixed the curtains and spoke about his encounters with the National Front. Blaring music from next door drew us into a Kurdish girl's bedroom and for a while we were her teenage confidantes, staying up too late listening to stories about not being Turkish. Delicious smells lured us finally into a kitchen, where a Vietnamese man was making dinner for his mother and talking about the differences between their ideas of home. We spent only a few minutes with each character but in every scene and during the carefully choreographed movements between them we were encouraged to feel welcomed into a real home. There were no curtain calls providing closure on this immersive theatrical experience and many of us came away with heightened senses of the people and spaces around us, wondering what stories they carried with them.

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