Global Migration and the Right to the Cities of the Future

This project, developed by Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), seeks to understand changing patterns of settlement, global labour markets, and new forms of citizenship at the global, national and local level. In particular, the project will develop models for integrating migrants into local communities, improving cohesion and facing the ethical and practical tensions of allocating limited resources, such as housing and healthcare services. How will people live together in the cities of the future? Unprecedented levels of global mobility will require unprecedented forms of flexible governance and citizenship. Emergent patterns of settlement will be structured by the movement of people through labour markets that are global in their reach and regimes of governance and citizenship that are continental, national and local. This interdisciplinary research project seeks to understand the practical and conceptual challenges that will be generated by these shifts.

About the project

The research is developing models of theorising and resolving the challenges of integration and cohesion in the cities of the 21st century. This is built on an interdisciplinary intellectual base and contributes directly to public policy debate through the generation of both scenario planning of urban change and practical resolutions of urban policy dilemmas. Research questions include:

The research operates at three geographical scales, exploring the relationships between the globe, Europe and the UK, including how changes at one scale impact the others. At all of these scales, demographic change is reconfiguring the relationship between universal rights, on the one hand (as elaborated in liberal and social democratic political traditions), and the political affects of belonging and identity, on the other (as elaborated in the communitarian political tradition and the multicultural agenda of the late 20th century).

Methodology

The project examines the scale of Europe trough site visits to a sample of European partner cities (Amsterdam, Athens, Budapest, Istanbul, Madrid – all cities experiencing major demographic change and significant tension around cohesion and integration), we will develop intensive collaborations with key urbanists in the partner cities, both academics and practitioners, who are developing innovative research and practice in this area. The focus of the site visits is to understand innovations in the architecture of municipal governance and how the municipal state is designing in to city life new opportunities for community cohesion, intercultural dialogue and public communication around the right to the city. In the UK, two short-term case studies will aim to understand how social welfare rights need to be recalibrated in the age of migration. The first, led by Hiranthi Jayaweera, focuses on the health service, exemplifying tensions between the allocation of welfare rights on the basis of need and allocation on the basis of belonging (often understood through who has contributed to the public purse). It will be based in Birmingham, the second largest and most diversely populated urban conurbation in the UK, now home to several different types of migrants, each with differing health needs, cultural differences relevant to healthcare, and varying entitlements to primary and hospital care depending on immigration status and country of origin. The second, led by Ben Gidley, focuses on social housing, through a pilot ethnographic study across three sites in London, where migrant demand for housing, and settled residents’ perceptions of ‘unfair’ allocation, have fuelled right-wing extremist activity, to understand how political sentiments of identity, belonging and place reshape access to social goods in the space of the local. While long-settled social housing residents may have a sense of entitlement to housing and an attachment to the local, the limited availability of stock creates competition and resentments which both feed and are fed on by xenophobic parties and movements.

Impact summary

This project, and the ensuing larger-scale research for which it is a pilot, will impact the future of housing and healthcare policy at the UK and European level. At the level of welfare delivery, the UK-based research will intervene directly in how Primary Care Trusts, Hospital Trusts, Strategic Health Authorities, the Housing Corporation, local and regional authorities and registered social landlords and other key agencies plan for the delivery of housing and health to a changing population. A key part of both UK case studies is roundtables which bring together agencies and community organisations. The findings of the research will help fill knowledge gaps and inform wider debates on citizenship and allocation of social goods. At the level of the European city, the project has clear policy and academic impacts through platforms built between city authorities across Europe, and by feeding into EU programmes and networks such as EuroCities, CLIP and the Council of Europe’s Directorate of Culture (organisers of the Intercultural Cities programme). At a global level, there are urgent ethical and policy debates and significant gaps in social scientific knowledge about the impact of migrants on the systems of global and national governance, as 20th century forms of governance are increasingly revealed as not fit for purpose in the age of migration. A major position paper will theorise the role and dilemmas of cities within structures of globalising governance in addressing the challenges of migration, integration and cohesion in our urban age.

About the research team

The research is based at COMPAS and delivered under the leadership of COMPAS Director Professor Michael Keith. The Principal Investigator is Dr Ben Gidley, Senior Researcher, is responsible for developing a workstream around the challenges of integration. This workstream has recently commenced with a one-year project for the European Commission’s Fund for the Integration of Third-Country Nationals, examining the processes of migrant integration, developing innovative indicators for measuring integration. Dr Hiranthi Jayaweera, Senior Researcher, will lead another strand, focusing on how health provision can respond to the evolving diversity of local service users. She has worked extensively on healthcare access among migrants, minority ethnic groups and economically disadvantaged populations, focusing on maternal and infant healthcare and more broadly on issues around community cohesion relating to recent migrants in urban areas.