The Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning

Research Project: Integrating migration, integration, and participation into integrated urban development concepts

Project briefing

  • Status Completed
  • Project duration June 2021 – October 2022
  • Programme ExWoSt

As part of this research project, a practical guide was developed to help municipalities anchor the topics of migration, integration, and participation into integrated urban development concepts. The guide is based on an evaluation of 100 municipal urban development concepts.

Background

Integration is shaped locally in the cities, districts, and municipalities, with the municipalities playing a key role. However, there are considerable regional and, within the cities, small-scale differences in the organisation of integrational tasks.

Based on the understanding that integration is a generational task and thus a more long-term process, integration tasks should be reflected in the underlying urban development policy objectives. This approach considers that integration is interrelated to the continuous task that arises again with each wave of immigration. Migration-specific issues and tasks have multiple interfaces with long-term urban development processes. In order to illustrate the importance of integration tasks at the level of urban development, topics and tasks from the field of migration are to be implemented within the goals of integrated urban development concepts.

Municipal integration policy encompasses a wide range of issues. Enabling people to participate in all areas of society shapes the understanding of integration tasks. Areas in which participation is an issue are housing, access to language services, the labour market and income, education, childcare, counselling or health and cultural participation. Participation processes and measures against discrimination and xenophobia are also part of municipal integration policy. Due to the wide range of topics, local governments are subject to a multitude of different responsibilities and competencies within and outside the administration. Ideally, these should be integrated into the development and design tasks of municipal integration policy. By formulating overarching goals, stronger commitments can be created in the cooperation on the cross-cutting task of integration.

In practice, however, examples can be found in which these cross-cutting tasks are not explicitly mentioned in integrated urban development concepts. This may be due to a different understanding either of the responsibilities of urban development for integration tasks or of the municipal fields of action to be considered or described in general. The main hypothesis of the research project was therefore that different understandings exist at the municipal level regarding an integrated view of urban development on the topic of integration and migration.

Objective

The research project is a core project of the thematic forum on Urban Development and Housing within the framework of the National Action Plan on Integration (German: Nationaler Aktionsplan Integration NAP-I). The aim was to anchor the topics of migration, integration, and participation in urban development planning and later also in neighbourhood development.

The aim of the research project was to promote the integration and participation of migrants in key areas of urban development, to identify good approaches and to derive recommendations for their implementation in integrated urban development concepts. This resulted in the guide on "Migration, Integration and Participation in Integrated Urban Development Concepts. A Guide for Municipal Practice" (German: „Migration, Integration und Teilhabe in integrierten Konzepten der Stadtentwicklung. Ein Leitfaden für die kommunale Praxis“).

The project was carried out by empirica ag, Bonn.

Contact us

  • Dr. Judith Kaschowitz
    Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development
    Division RS 4 "Urban Development Grants, Social Urban Development"
    Phone: +49 228 99401-2412
    Email: judith.kaschowitz@bbr.bund.de

This Page