| Description |
'Immigration is a “hot issue” in many European countries and the cities represent the main gateway for the majority of the newcomers. From the spatial dynamics and policies’ point of view, the debate on urban space and immigration has been dominated by the topic of the problematic aspects of the newcomers’ concentration in specific neighbourhoods. In this direction, space policies have always been characterized by a dominant approach aimed at mitigating forms of concentration, dispersing the immigrants groups across the urban territory. In the last twenty years these forms of intervention have mainly resulted in the promotion of 'social mixing' initiatives that the proposal puts under critical observation. In this direction, a core objective is considering some core concepts and narratives that underpin analysis and forms of intervention in multi-ethnic neighborhoods as “assumptions” that, far to be proofed, play a large part in conditioning the public debate and policy agendas on this issue, but also in orientating the researchers’ ways of seeing. This objective implies a reframing of the descriptions and of the forms of intervention in multi-ethnic settlements, considering the “concentration/segregation” issue as a powerful “assumption” that is at once both descriptive and prescriptive leading to “mixing” policies as an embedded answer to descriptions based on concentration. In this general context, the project aims at challenging existing descriptions of multi-ethnic settlements, at detecting alternative modes of interventions in such urban environments with a particular attention to the role that the public hand may play in the face of the welfare restructuring, at developing innovative methodologies and intellectual approaches to these neighbourhoods and at establishing a series of policy recommendations that will be of value to urban policy across the EU.'
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