Overview
This project addresses the impact of migration on cohesion and integration in geographical areas of restructuring and city transformation. The links between labour demand and migration flows form a well-developed strand of work in migration studies. Equally, the attempt to restructure city form, modernise the social and economic life of the metropolis through major programmes of regeneration constitutes a well-developed strand of contemporary urban studies. However, the links between the two concerns are less frequently studied.
In the UK, the project will build upon the work of the government’s Commission on Integration and Cohesion (CIC), set up in response to the 7 July 2005 London bombings and reported to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government in 2007. It will develop a wide range of examples at national and continental scales to consider how different models of integration and cohesion support or contradict both academic agendas and policy thinking in this area of work. It will also address both the ethical basis of alternative models of cohesion and integration, and the practical outcomes of the dilemmas confronting sites of migrant settlement in the last decade.