Chapter 5 Urban partnerships to manage mobility
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• In Italy, the city of Reggio Emilia has invested in a non-profit social agency, the Mondinsieme Intercultural Centre, to assist with immigrant inclusion.18 • Fujian province in China has established a Provincial Office of Opening to the Outside World, which helps local governments to be more flexible towards foreign investors, many of whom are Chinese expatriates (Zhu, 1999). • Singapore, with a rapidly growing immigrant population, set up a National Integration Council which in turn launched the Community Integration Fund in 2009 to promote interaction and harmony between immigrants and the local community (Yeoh and Lin, 2013). • In Japan, the Committee for Localities with a Concentrated Foreign Population is a mayors’ gathering to devise practical solutions for the challenges of increasing migration-led diversity in their cities (see text box 6).
5.4 MIGRANTS AS CITY-MAKERS
Migrants can play a role as city-makers, helping their adopted cities achieve a global profile by promoting the historical, cultural, religious and socioeconomic facets, provided that the right opportunities exist to enable this to happen. Cities are nested in a hierarchy of relationships that extends up to state, federal and supranational entities and down to communities, neighbourhood and immigrants. Overcoming, for example, a divergence between national migration policies and local needs and capacities is one of the most challenging aspects of the urban governance of migration. Supranational level regulations, such as those of the World Trade Organization, binding agreements of regional economic communities, such as the European Commission, and various national and local jurisdictions all affect migrants’ economic insertion, employment prospects, wages and entrepreneurial opportunities. Furthermore, cities have a specific institutional structure of governance, culture and history which all contribute to form a “territorialized opportunity structure” (Glick Schiller and Çağlar, 2009). Cities and migrants can mutually benefit each other. Therefore it is important to understand the relationship between the economic, political and cultural positioning of cities within the global system and the ability of migrants to forge a place for themselves within a specific locality (Glick Schiller and Çağlar, 2013). The city of Mardin is a story of city leaders’ efforts to rebuild and reposition their city and emigrants’ efforts to re-establish relationships to the city at a particular conjuncture of opportunity structures. It illustrates how specific forms of diversity involving migrant groups became an asset for urban development and also part of the city’s bid for an improved position in the world. It shows migrants becoming part of city-making processes as bearers of historical, cultural and religious diversity, as well as agents of economic development (text box 31).
18 www.annalindhfoundation.org/members/fondazione-mondinsieme-del-comune-di-reggio-emilia-0