Report WS6 – Immigration and new inhabitants in the Gateway Cities

It is in the last years that the planning discipline has fully recognized immigration issues as decisive for their role both in the urban studies and in the policy design. Nowadays, in Italy and Europe, the shifting social composition of the cities asks the planner for new cognitive instruments and new strategies for the interventions on urban systems. The present report resumes the results of the workshop “Immigration and new inhabitants in the gateway cities” which took place inside the IX Biennial of Towns and Town Planners of Europe, held in Genoa in September 2011. In the two days of debate, a number of Italian and European examples has been presented: the report underlines three issues about immigration and the city which emerged from the presentations: the role and the methods of public policy interventions, the absence of policies and institutional vacuum, the micro-scale effects of the presence of immigrant people. The debate has clearly showed how Italy is pinpointed by a great variety of policies and practices, arising by a fragmented and not yet clear institutional frame about immigration regulations. At the same time, some examples have described processes connected with absence of institutional actors: in the total absence of public interventions different phenomena arise. Within such a context, sometimes natives and immigrants are able to develop their own capacities to face the lack of services and residences. In conclusion, the issues emerged during the workshop questions about the challenges for urban planning. In an institutional context where the recognition of the citizenship is an issue far to be solved for large portions of immigrant populations, the challenge for urban planning can be resumed as that of finding local levels of access to the public space, to be intended both as a “physical” and a social one. Can planning and local policies act “social” in a context where national and communitarian laws just face immigration fluxes as economical ones?