Konstantin V. Grigorichev* Irkutsk State University 1 Karl Marx Str., Irkutsk, 664003, Russia Received 07.10.2015, received in revised form 18.01.2016, accepted 30.03.2016 The article considers the relation between media images of migrant localities and their role in everyday life of the city, the example being “Chinese” markets and “Chinese” greenhouses. <...> Migrant localities are viewed as “gated space” and, at the same time, access points of local communities and migrants to multi-level social networks. <...> It is shown that regional mass media shape the image of these localities as closed (gated) spaces that leads to a situation of contested space and the authoritative agents’ ambition to force migrant localities out of urban space. <...> However, these objects perform the function of the terminals of access to networks, the function providing a stable position of migrant localities in the social space as well as reproduction in the physical space of host society. <...> Cross-border migrants have become an integral part of everyday life of Russian cities, at least of all regional centres in the eastern part of Russia. <...> Migrants’ steady integration into urban life vividly demonstrates the emergence of localities, marked as ethno-migrant ones, in urban space. <...> It is extremely diffi cult to fi nd a city in Siberia and the Far East without a “Chinese” market (or even several markets sometimes), rows of Kyrgyz shopping stalls which grew out of the open air markets into a full-fl edged shopping centers and malls. <...> Such migrant localities stretch outside city boundaries in the forms of © Siberian Federal University. <...> Mass infl ux of migrants has sharply intensifi ed the process of the urban space ethnicizing which began at the end of 1980-s. <...> New phenomena, localities, form of economic activity and relations, arising on the basis of cross-border migrations, began to be viewed as ethnic ones. <...> The defi nition of migrant localities as ethnic ones has rather fi rmly rooted in urban space and media, despite a loss of their ethnic solidarity as a basis of activity. <...> Thus, “Chinese” markets are still defi ned as ethnic Konstantin V. Grigorichev. <...> Migrant Localities: “Gated Space” or “Access Points”? markets, despite the fact that the term refers to certain forms of urban economy <...>