1. Introduction

In the 2016 “Pact of Amsterdam”, which launched the Urban Agenda for the European Union (UAEU or EUA), the very first item out of twelve listed themes — although it is stated in the document that the themes come “in no particular order” — is “Inclusion of migrants and refugees”. Maybe its top position is actually not intentional, but in any case, “migration and inclusion” represents one of the main challenges during the present years for our territories, towns, cities and societies in Europe: the approaches of a variety of political organisations with growing consensus, as well as of some of the national governments, are heavily influenced by this topic and are progressively implementing policies aiming to “protect” — so they say — national identities, economic wellbeing, security of citizens, and so forth.
Migrations are an unavoidable characteristic of the contemporary global society. The reasons of this phenomenon are many and complex, and this is not the right place to discuss or try to understand them, nor can we, the European spatial planners, judge if migrations are a good thing or not. But: spatial planners in Europe and other regions of immigration can and have to contribute through their knowledge to minimise the negative impact produced by “unsupervised” migration and to maximise — in economic and cultural terms — the value added of immigration for the whole society. At the same time, spatial planners working in regions of emigration (peripherical Europe, Africa, etc.) can and have to contribute — so far as possible — to create conditions to maximise life opportunities in the local contexts and to deal with “empty” territories.

2. WG Objectives

In the Pact of Amsterdam document, the objectives of theme “Inclusion of migrants and refugees” are described as follows.
“[…] manage integration of incoming migrants and refugees (extra-EU) and […] provide a framework for their inclusion based on willingness and integration capacity of local communities. This will cover: housing, cultural integration, provision of public services, social inclusion, education and labour market measures, chances of second-third generations, spatial segregation.”
This EUA point of view needs to be translated into a more spatial-planning related approach. By considering also the short scoping discussion already held via email in October 2017 within the first WG, the objectives of the ECTP WG can be expressed as follows.
● Elaboration of a charter-style strategic approach document;
● Production of technical recommendations in planning practice;
● Dissemination of the results inside the planners’ community as well as to the whole society;
● Active participation to the EUA “Inclusion of migrants and refugees” Partnership;
● Interaction with EU’s, CoE’s, UN’s, AU’s etc. organs and agencies to submit specific action proposals.

3. First ideas to start

Starting from the considerations mentioned in the previous two paragraphs, the very first steps of this WG could be the following.
● The WG’s activity should also include intra-EU and national migration movements, as well as traditional urban and metropolitan centrifugal and centripetal dynamics;
● The term “inclusion” should be conceived as referred also to integration between cross-border contexts, with a special concern on urban or metropolitan areas, whereas a “border” is either a state border, a linguistic border or some other kind of precise political or fuzzy cultural border line;
● More in general, migration and inclusion should be treated in all its manifestations: economic interna-tional emi¬gra¬tion/im¬mi¬gra¬tion; war/climatic refugee movements; internal (national/EU) labour market movements; slow, programmed processes versus humanitarian emergencies; small versus huge cultural differences between “old” and “new” population; first, second, nth generation issues; segregation versus assimilation versus inclusion;
● The WG’s field of activity needs to be defined more closely with respect to: spatial planning (the EUA is more than spatial planning); role of professional planners (ECTP’s main concern); current European (EU, Council of Europe) and International (UN and its agencies, AU, etc.) decision-making spheres; desirable professional and decision-making competencies at European level;
● Spatial planning must focus also on those territories that lost or are losing population due to emigration phenomena (links to the general issue of structurally weak territories, as well as e.g. to the difficulties of territorial reconstruction after earthquakes);
● In order to correctly approach the argument, it will be necessary to carry out a preliminary study on how migration and inclusion appears now and in the past and how they are perceived in the different countries and regions;
● As a first case study the German approach applied as of the 2015 refugee crisis could be analysed, when a high number of displaced persons have been received in a relatively short time and many ef-forts — not without errors — had been made to put into practice social inclusion;
● As a second, more punctual case study, the “Riace model” could be analysed; Riace is a small town in Southern Italy where migrants from different countries have been granted rights to settle down and substantially take over the role former inhabitants had before they emigrated to other countries some decades ago;
● It could be evaluated if the 2020 Award or the 2021 Biennial should be dedicated to “Migration and Inclusion from the Spatial Planning Perspective”.
4 Possible WG composition
Since migration an inclusion issues do not shape and are not perceived in the same way in all European countries, the composition of the WG should possibly represent these differences. The following groups of countries should be considered:
● Former colonial powers;
● Countries with important past/present emigration/immigration phenomena;
● Countries with important past or present internal migration phenomena;
● Countries of the Visegrád Group;
● Mediterranean “frontier” EU member states.

Members are:
– Markus Hedorfer (Working Group Chair)
– Chantal Guillet
– Vincent Goodstadt
– John Downey