Copenhagen Conference - September 25 - 27, 1997

Speech by Meyer Burstein

On behalf of the Metropolis International Steering Committee, I would like to sincerely thank our Danish hosts, the Danish organizing committee, our Canadian Secretariat and ERCOMER, my co-chair Demetrios Papademetriou, DG XII of the EC, UNESCO-MOST and the many individuals from Europe, from North and South America, from Africa and from Israel who are contributing to the Project and who are committed to making this Danish conference as successful as was the first Metropolis conference in Milan.

For some of you, your association with Metropolis dates back to when it was an egg. For others this is your first exposure to the Project.

I want to welcome all of you.

What I will do this morning is to describe the Project - its objectives and its methods ........ I will tell you about important initiatives that we've started ..... and I will outline our hopes for this event and for the future. Now I know that some of you have heard parts of this before. If you have, just sing along. For the rest of you, you should know that I'll be doing this over and over again. There's no escape. So you may as well throw in the towel and learn the chorus.

The central theme of the Metropolis Project ..... its raison d'etre ...... and the principle around which our partnership is being built... is the idea that cities....and societies.... of the twenty-first century... will need knowledge.... knowledge that does not yet exist if they are to successfully address the challenges posed by migration.......and if they are to capitalize on the opportunities that migration presents.

Metropolis seeks to provide a framework for this knowledge. A framework for comparative and cross-national research ... research that illuminates policy debates; that leads to better and more informed decision-making; and that evaluates existing policy and program practices.

We want to make available to decision-makers -- to Ministers, Mayors, administrators and NGOs -- options for action: Options that will result in immigrants being incorporated as equal members of the societies in which they live; options that preserve and build on what is already valuable and valued in the host societies that receive those migrants. This will not be easy to acheive.

As we know only too well, wherever there is migration, there is also a tug-of-war. A contest, sometimes real, sometimes perceived, over space, over jobs, over rights and over behaviour. The contest is always about change. And it is often about apprehensions.

The environment is volatile. No one is immune. And so it's not surprising if, from time to time, we stumble. In fact, Demetri and I have often thought that the Metropolis egg would end up an omelet.

Success where migration is concerned will take vision, creativity and leadership. It will take courage - political and otherwise - to get things right. And - and this is the chorus I asked you to sing before - it will take knowledge.

What unites our partnership - the Metropolis partnership - is a shared understanding of the qualities and the quality of the knowledge we require. A shared understanding that commits us, the shareholders, to common action.

Two attributes of this approach stand out:

First and foremost, is the commitment to ensuring that the questions we pose are relevant to public policy and to problem solving.

We must create ... and manage .... frameworks wherein policy makers, academics and other stakeholders are provided with opportunities to discuss issues, to negotiate research methods and to interpret results.

We will have to practice inclusiveness:

Knowledge clients and knowledge producers will need to work together: To pose the right questions..... to make sure that answers are relevant ..... accessible ..... valued ...... and relied upon in decision making.

There are many contradictions to be resolved:

We will have to keep research and advocacy apart at the same time as we bring researchers and advocates together........ at the same time as we encourage researchers to lay out the policy implications of their work and to contribute to the development of sound, balanced policy options.

Equally challenging, we will need to evolve strategies for bridging the disjunction that arises from the fact that policy horizons are near while research horizons are distant and because policy making is synthetic while research is frequently case-specific.

Abstracting from this, the key point that I want to make is that Metropolis is not just about increasing the flow of information about migration and its urban consequences.

It is equally about the technology of decision-making.

The second attribute or prescriptive that I want to stress is that our research will have to be robust. It will have to be sound both theoretically and empirically.

Because it will have to stand up to serious, and sometimes hostile, scrutiny.

There will undoubtedly be pressure on individual members to provide early results. To demonstrate value and to support positions in what has become, everywhere, an increasingly urgent debate.

We must resist this. We must resist the temptation to pronounce ourselves based on incomplete evidence. On single studies. And on isolated viewing angles.

Wherever possible we should draw on comparative work: on multiple disciplinary perspectives; and on studies that examine more than one country and more than one city.

This will require both individual and collective effort. We will collectively need to create and to tend the market for international comparative research. But we must individually assume responsibility for creating the domestic antecedents that provide us with our core support.

There must be no mistaking the fact that the strength of our overall enterprise hinges on the quality and strength of our domestic efforts. On our ability to mobilize and to retain the interest of our domestic communities.

Because only if we succeed in creating value domestically will we be able to direct the attention of our constituencies - the senior policy makers, the academics, the intermediaries who work in the policy field, and the NGO's -- to our international work ..... only then will we be able to attract them to our conferences and events; getting them to listen, to learn and to contribute to the process and to the pool of research and best practice information that Metropolis is creating.

OK ..... let's turn to specifics ... to this Conference ... its relation to Milan and our progress over the past year.

As you've just heard from Guido Bolaffi, Milan had three critical objectives. The first was to set the strategic agenda for Metropolis. The second was to attract the attention of our target international constituency. And the third was to transfer ownership from the planners to the participants, making them responsible for the Project's future and for launching the next phase of the Project.

These goals were deliberately bold and ambitious so we weren't too surprised or too disappointed by the fact that we didn't realize all of them. They did, however, serve their purpose, providing us with direction and helping us to mobilize both interest and resources.

A number of broad strategic themes emerged during our discussions in Milan. Three of these were selected as priorities for the Copenhagen conference:

The priority themes centre on issues of economic integration and labour markets;

On issues of social cohesion and tolerance;

And on issues of spatial concentration and mobility, both social and economic mobility.

You will be spending quite a bit of time on these themes over the next few days so I don't think I can contribute much either by deconstructing the synthesis that was achieved in Milan or by anticipating the discussions that will take place during this conference.

I would however like to draw your attention to one critical factor and that is that the themes embrace issues of vital importance to both migrants and host communities.

This is important because successful public policy must deal with both constituencies. Harmonious societies can only exist where there is a perception by both sides of fair and equitable treatment. Successful integration can only result if there is broad public support for the necessary complex of immigration related programs and services.

Successful management of migration depends on a large part of society viewing immigration as a positive force and as a matter of public choice and not forced compliance.

In addressing the strategic themes, it is important to keep in mind that we must ultimately satisfy two constituencies - that of newcomers and that of host.

In deciding on the agenda for Copenhagen, our International Steering Committee had three goals in mind:

The first was that Copenhagen would have to respect and build on the directions established in Milan;

The second was that the Copenhagen conference should place more emphasis on cities and on the interactions between immigrants and their urban environments;

The third was that Copenhagen could not repeat Milan by limiting itself to the planning of future research;

Our agenda from now through Saturday reflects the efforts of our Steering Committee to implement these decisions:

The presentation by Professor Robin Cohen from the University of Warwick is intended to contextualize our discussions and to challenge us with a vision of where we might be heading.

This is followed by the city case studies - - two from North America and two from Europe - - which are intended as laboratories for our use in exploring, verifying, rejecting or modifying the positions that are developed in the theme papers and the points that emerge during our working group discussions.

In the town hall session that follows, we will try in a somewhat more interactive and entertaining way to draw on the work and the experience of our panelists and of the audience to bring out the practical challenges that face us in managing immigration and in delivering immigration services and the ancillary programs that are necessary to house, educate and look after migrants.

We want you to take this away and to reflect on the plenary presentations, on the Danish program for combatting social exclusion, and on the additional city profiles that are presented during the sub-plenaries.

We want you to reflect on this and then we want you to critique what you have heard and to offer your own suggestions for research and for managing the integration of migrants within cities.

On the third day, we will want to hear from our thematic presenters, humbled but hopefully not humiliated, about the adequacy of their frameworks; we will want to know where our existing knowledge base is able to support the decisions that need to be taken and where additional research should be commissioned.

We particularly want to know what international comparative work is required - what hypotheses need to be tested - in order for us to develop better policies and programs; and we want to know where we should look for successful experiments .... whom we can learn from and whom we should teach.

In our final session, Demetrios will examine -- in a preliminary way -- some of the key ideas that emerged during the conference and he will explore their importance for the manner in which we think about and address integration.

He will do this, in part, by leading a panel session where he will be eliciting practical reactions to the reports emanating from the six working groups. Our aim is to test market the advice that is being proffered and to explore how it might best be adapted to local circumstances.

........ which leads us apart from some important announcements and an interesting tour to a few remarks about the next phase of Metropolis.

Some of you who were in Milan will recognize a number of similarities between our first conference and this one.

I hope this doesn't lead you to conclude that our progress is slow. Because we are operating at two levels. What you do not see is the work that has gone into developing a sustaining infrastructure and this is what I would like to share with you in my concluding remarks.

What became clear to us immediately after Milan - in fact, we were already aware of this in the leadup to the first conference - was that we had ideas, we had a vision and we had a gameplan but we did not have the means to successfully execute our strategies. We simply lacked the infrastructure to sustain our initiatives.

Based on this, we have made significant investments over the last year and, on several fronts, we have seen considerable progress:

As some of you know, for the last three or so years, we ... in Canada .. have provided virtually all of the secretariat resources to the Metropolis Project cannibalizing our domestic undertaking. This was sustainable at the beginning but as the project picked up steam we were unable to keep pace.

We could not capitalize on interest in Europe and elsewhere; we could not develop the partnerships that were offered and we could not add sufficient value to the transactions we embarked on.

This judgement may be a bit too harsh but too many of our exchanges were characterized by words and not enough by actions. In a nutshell, we were unable to launch the truly comparative research agenda we had hoped to foster.

This I believe is about to change. I am happy to announce that as of September, a European arm has been added to the secretariat. It will be housed with ERCOMER at the University of Uttrecht and it is lead by Malcolm Cross. Support for the European Arm comes from the EC - specifically DG 12. This will do wonderful things for our capacity to act.

The second thing I would like to alert you to is the work and the progress we have been making in developing a communication infrastructure.

For the last two years, we have been investing intensively in the development of a Canadian testbed for an international network of Metropolis websites.

Our aim is to create a client-focussed, user friendly and appropriately homogenous network of national sites -- I chose every one of those words carefully - sites that link together researchers and policy makers.

The testbed model containing a virtual library of research, a listing of experts and expertise, an automated publication management system, specialized search engines, intranets and public education sections is well advanced in Canada and will be fully operational towards the end of November.

It is being demonstrated here and I would strongly urge you to take the time to examine it. Our strategic intent is to bind together the entire policy and research community that comprises the project.....giving it a corporate identity, and empowering it through state of the art technology.

The full value of this enterprise will only be realized in two to three years but six months from now we would expect to start reaping returns. How much depends on how quickly individual members are prepared to act and the resources they are able to mobilize.

The third thing that makes us optimistic about progress is the success of individual partners. The Canadian Program is now well established with research underway in all four centres and the first results beginnning to come in.

Other countries have seen expansions in their domestic programs as well. To name a few:

the US program has grown considerably adding programs in the areas of citizenship, housing and welfare reform;

similarly, our UK partner has expanded his interests as have our Scandinavian partners and Israel.

As I indicated before, the success of our international effort depends very much on the existence of strong domestic platforms so these advances are very heartening and very promising in terms of the future success of Metropolis.

The fourth thing - and we have just begun to discuss this amongst ourselves - is that we are planning to initiate a series of international seminars on selected topics and, a little further in the future, academic exchanges .

Over the next year -- and before the next conference --- we would like to identify ..... drawing on some of the work that is being done here ...... roughly four topics that we can move ahead to the project stage and actually commence work on a series of international comparative studies.

This is where the infrastructure we have been developing will make a critical difference. And this is why I am anticipating that our pace will accelerate. I am very much looking forward to the next phase.

This project ... Metropolis ... has, for many of us, been a labour of love.

We believe in it. In the results it promises. In the methods we are employing.

Sometimes I think that our enthusiasm is naive. I hope it's contagious.

Either way, we are feeling fairly righteous. And we are definitely having fun.

I hope you will feel this way at the end of this conference.

Thank you.