METROPOLIS INTER CONFERENCE -
International Conference on Divided Cities and Strategies for Undivided Cities,
Göteborg, Sweden, May 25 - 26, 1998

The Agenda of the Metropolis Project - an International Forum for Research and Policy on Migration and Cities

Meyer Burstein
Executive Head
Metropolis Project, Citizenship and Immigration Canada
165 Laurier West
Journal Tower South
Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 1L1
Canada

Tel: + 1 613 957-5971
Fax: + 1 613 957-5968
Email: meyer.burstein@9522apx.cina.cic.x400.gc.ca 

I would like to begin by telling you that my colleagues and I are delighted to be in Göteborg to attend this conference on divided cities. We would especially like to thank our hosts, Göteborg City, the University and the Municipal Housing Group.

We would also like to thank Kristine Dösen for her work. She has demonstrated amazing energy. No matter what day or what time we sent Kristine an e-mail, she was there to respond. Not with one message but with three. So if this conference is successful, a lot of credit is due to her for promoting the idea, for recruiting speakers and for bringing together such an interesting mix of researchers and practitioners.

This conference is important to us: Important because it marks a significant evolution in the life of Metropolis. There are several reasons for this beginning with the fact that this is our first inter-conference event and the initiation of a new format. The past two years have produced a network and have cemented allegiance to the Project's idea but we have also come to realise that we need to intensify our interactions and our exchanges. In short, we need to bring small numbers of people together to think and to work in a format like this one.

Another reason for attaching so much importance to this conference is that it marks a shift in ownership from the Project Secretariat to the participants. Here we owe an extraordinary debt to Kristine and to her colleagues for undertaking this valuable work and then offering to bring it to Israel to share with a larger number of countries. Hopefully, we can use this platform to establish networks and to create a self-sustaining program of research.

The title of my talk is : The Agenda of the Metropolis Project : An International Forum for Research and Policy on Migration and Cities My mission is evangelical. I am here as an advocate for a particular way of doing business - the business of policy-research. The process that I will be laying out is the one we have been developing in Canada. And it is what we are hoping to promote, in one form or another, to our international partners so that we can interconnect national networks of policy makers, researchers and other stakeholders. I would like to start my talk by simply listing for you a number of core ideas that gave rise to the Metropolis Project:

The first idea is that contemporary migration - for reasons of scale, complexity, and diversity - is a crucial public policy issue for advanced industrial nations. By calling it a public policy issue, I mean that for immigration not to fracture our societies, governments will have to intervene.

The second core idea is that for public policy to be successful, decision-makers must have access to, and must make use of, academic knowledge. This knowledge must be focused on policy concerns.

The third idea is that there exists, among receiving countries, a common set of urgent, migration-related concerns centred on the interactive effects of international migration with urban processes; and that to understand these effects better, and to respond to them, we need to carry out international comparative research and we need to exchange information about best practices. Those of us who participate in Metropolis believe that the viability of cities in the 21st century will depend on how well we manage immigration, particularly the challenges posed by integration - challenges that will have to be managed at the same time as cities are having to cope with fiscal constraints, with economic restructuring and with new demands for infrastructure.

The fourth idea underpinning the project is that the value of the exchange and the worth of the entire Metropolis Project depends critically on the strength of the national research efforts by participating countries.

And the fifth and final point is that for the national effort to be of maximal value, it must emanate from an intensive interaction between academics and policy makers. This process must be built because it does not presently exist.

This conference in Göteborg can be an important step in this direction - a step that we hope to replicate with other countries. In particular, we are pleased by the mix of practitioners and academics who are attending this event. It conforms very much to activities that we have undertaken at home and to activities that are starting to develop in some of our other partner countries. And so we will be watching this very closely to see what ultimately develops domestically, to see how effective it is in stimulating a wider exchange in Israel and to see what opportunities it creates for networking the policy-research community in Sweden to the policy-research community in other countries, something that we have not yet done effectively.

Let me turn to the Canadian model to show you where our ambitions lie. Our approach is, of course, not the only way to do business but we have worked very hard at elaborating our particular model. And while it is too early to draw conclusions, we are very hopeful of success.

In Canada, Metropolis is seen as an experiment, one that is closely watched by our central government agencies and by our research councils which have been participating with us in an ongoing Project review. The importance that is attached to the Project derives, in large part, from the context in which it originated, a context that will seem quite familiar to you in Sweden.

We constructed Metropolis at a time of severe constraints on government spending accompanied by a major exercise to examine the importance of various processes carried out by government. The aim was to determine whether those processes were still important and, if so, whether they still needed to be conducted by government or whether they could be undertaken by other agencies in society. The policy development process was not exempted from this review. In fact, a committee of the most senior civil servants concluded that when it came to dealing with complex strategic issues, that cut across several jurisdictions, the government `s policy development capacity was weak. Policy development was found to suffer from limited horizons and narrow perspectives. It was also insufficiently grounded in empirical evidence, largely because governments had not figured out how to construct an evidence-based policy development process.

Governments in Canada (and possibly Sweden) have typically managed knowledge by centralising the function, by hiring clever people, by making them responsible for receiving and dispensing knowledge, and then by assigning them myriad tasks - writing briefing notes, answering memos, etc. In short, governments have managed knowledge by employing a limited number of smart people and engaging them in non-research tasks. One of the important conclusions coming out of the Canadian government's study of the policy development process was that to do a better job of addressing strategic issues, there would need to be a greater reliance on external researchers - researchers in universities and in private think tanks. The desired improvement could not be achieved simply by increasing the size of government policy development shops. Exactly how this was to be accomplished, this engagement of the wider research community, was not specified, however. I do not know if Swedish cutbacks led you in similar directions but it would be surprising if they did not because governments everywhere have been struggling with these issues.

Accompanying the broad changes in thinking about the role of government, there were also some fundamental changes in the way Canadians perceive immigration. There was a time when the intellectual mainstream viewed immigration in a very uncritical way ... the idea that Canada was a nation built of immigrants ... that the country's future depended on the continued large-scale importation of labour ... that immigrants invigorated Canada. These views have now become more nuanced.

Immigration to Canada is still seen as a positive force for nation building, but there is a growing recognition that the ultimate success of immigration depends on how successful we are at fully integrating immigrants. And this success, in turn, depends on a complex of migration-related policies and programs which, if they are to be made available, will require support from the public at large. What this has produced within government has been a shift away from a focus on the management of visa numbers and entry permits to a larger concern with the management of consequences!! Not just consequences for the economy, those were always there, but consequences for the education system, for healthcare, for culture, for inter-group relations and, of course, for housing and neighbourhood development, issues for which, in many cases, the federal government does not have the primary responsibility. (In fact immigration is precisely the sort of issue I referred to before in terms of being cross-jurisdictional, complex, long-term, etc.)

What has become increasingly clear is that for immigration to be managed successfully, a large number of decision-makers will have to operate from a shared strategic platform with a knowledge of the issues, how they are related, and what effects their interventions are having - the same questions that you are posing to yourselves here in Sweden. In effect, our countries are converging on these questions from different directions: Canada as a country of immigrants that is beginning to ask itself fundamental questions about objectives and impacts; Sweden as a country that is in the process of opening up (because that is where we are all moving) but struggling to find the right public policy response. All to say that there is ample basis for the exchange of information - not just within Europe but between Europe and North America.

Having told you why we undertook our Project, I would like to describe, briefly, how Metropolis is organised in Canada.

I hope that I am not disappointing you by not talking about the issues but my intent, and my explicit instructions from Kristine, was to promote Metropolis and to help build durable links to our policy-research network. If this is to happen, it is important for you to understand what you would be connecting yourselves to; the nature of the network; how it is animated; and how we would like its nodes to behave

The idea of the Metropolis Project originated in the summer of 1994 and was developed through an exchange of papers and a series of discussions between myself and Demetrios Papademetriou who is a Senior Associate and Director of the International Migration Program with the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. By December of that year, we in Canada had convened a conference of academic researchers and policy officials for two days of talks aimed at producing a research agenda.

We emerged from our meeting with a set of project objectives and a series of research topics categorised under six domains: These were: (i) the economy; (ii) education; (iii) a social domain; (iv) a citizenship and cultural domain; (v) a public services and political domain; and (vi) a physical infrastructure domain.

Let me give you examples of some of the key topics listed under these domains:

Economic domain: We wanted to know the extent to which immigration could contribute to the government's microeconomic agenda and to trade. Could immigration from Hong Kong be thought of as a device for promoting trade with China? Does immigration impact entrepreneurship, i.e., is it a source of small business development? What effect does immigration have on local wages and working conditions? Can it retard regional mobility and structural adjustment? How do immigrants perform economically? What are the barriers they face in regard to labour and income mobility?

Education domain: What impact does immigration have on educational attainment? What is the impact on the host population of immigrant values regarding education? What is the impact of high immigrant concentration in urban schools on learning, on the transmission of skills, including language skills and on the acquisition of values? How should tensions in the schools be managed? What is the value of cross-cultural relations training and of anti-racism training?

Social domain: Are there significant differences in the integration of immigrants from non-traditional sources (emphasis on language and socio-economic mobility)? Is immigration contributing to the formation of a social underclass, i.e., to social exclusion? Under what circumstances might this happen? In what way and to what extent do immigrants participate in both formal and informal social networks? How do they change the demand for NGO services? In what instances should services be culturally specific and where is it best to rely on universal delivery?

The same sorts of fundamental questions were also posed in the other domains: Do immigrants participate in the political process? What "public goods" do they seek and how do these differ, if at all, from mainstream demands? What is the role of the media? How does immigration impact on culture products? What effect does immigration have on social tolerance? How does immigration affect the demand for and use of public space, like parks? What are the effects on housing stock and on the demand for housing? How does immigration shape the formation of ethnic, cultural and religious enclaves? Under what circumstances does immigration lead to the renewal of urban neighbourhoods? How does it affect public transport? And so on.

Using these research priorities - which we elaborated in consultation with academics and policymakers - we began the task of putting together a federal consortium to fund the research. We were not looking for incremental monies but simply to redirect and to co-ordinate existing research expenditures - and we succeeded. With the help of our Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRCC), we created a pool of $8 million to start up four Centres of Excellence for a period of six years. Bids were invited in the summer of 1995 and grants were awarded in May of 1996 through an academic peer-reviewed process. Now for some interesting features: First, each Centre is a consortium of major universities. We lobbied hard for this with universities and their administrations because we did not think that any one school had the critical mass of researchers needed to undertake the scope of what was being proposed. Our Centres are located in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Edmonton. They comprise fifteen universities - including major institutions, such as the University of Toronto, McGill University, the University of Montreal, the University of Alberta, and the University of British Columbia - and list some three hundred associated researchers.

Second, the request for proposals to establish the Centres required each Centre to create local advisory structures and governing bodies. The aim was to broaden stakeholder involvement (again, consistent with one view of what was needed to manage the immigration program successfully). The advisory and management bodies now contain representatives from provinces, cities, NGOs, service delivery agencies (including the police) and representatives from the private sector.

Third, the request for proposals also required the Centres to develop communication strategies; to participate in national and international events; and to host, in rotation, a national conference.

Fourth, at the federal level, we have organised committees made up of representatives from funding departments whose task it is to work within their host departments in order to identify federal priorities; to raise the Project's profile; and to promote networking between academic researchers and departmental research and policy officials.

My own team functions as a sort of secretariat pursuing these same objectives, but more broadly. Our job has been that of facilitator and inventor. We create opportunities for people to come together, to share ideas and to find solutions. These ideas we seek to implement through persuasion, the provision of knowledge, financial incentives and pressures.

Some examples of what we have done are instructive. We have mounted six policy-research domain seminars in the areas of justice, health, education, gendering issues, human capital flows and the selection of immigrants for the economy. (The aim of each session was to bring researchers and policymakers together in order to do three things: to identify policy concerns; to identify the state of knowledge around those concerns; and to identify "gaps" for which research is needed. We have struck a partnership with the Centres to create a national website (http://www.international.metropolis.net). And we have worked to promote common approaches to data acquisition and to data production. (There are both regional and overarching national data committees.) Throughout, our aim has been to improve decision-making by importing academic knowledge into the policy process. This we do by promoting contact between policymakers and researchers and by developing techniques for sustaining their interactions and adding value to them. It would appear that we have been successful.

According to an independent study that we recently commissioned together with our granting council and our Department of Treasury, there are many reasons to be optimistic. The principal findings of the study wee, as follows:

An extraordinary amount of work has been completed to establish a secretariat, four research centres with their supporting organisations, an extensive network of researchers, an international network, a communications infrastructure and internet site, newsletters, domain conferences, national and international conferences and workshops.

The concept of Metropolis as an innovative way to relate research and policy has caught the imagination of a broad range of organisations: The structure is in place to support an ongoing dialogue between researchers and policymakers; a large and impressive volume of work is in the pipeline; students are receiving support; and numerous working papers are being produced and presented.

Notwithstanding these findings, there is still a lot that needs to be done. In particular, we need to clarify the results we expect (what would constitute success) along with the conditions that would ensure success. And, at the fundamental level of changing cultures - creating a machine that runs itself - we have not yet reached the point of sustainability. We had assumed that the agility of ideas could be translated immediately into new working relationships but for this to happen there needs to be a critical mass of converts and time to build a coalition of doers - people within each institution who will drive the Project forward.

I spent this time on the national project because I wanted to give you a sense of what we hope to stimulate within the international network - though not at so elaborate a level and probably not structured in the same way. At a minimum, we would like to build relationships with each Metropolis country that would produce linkages involving both academics and decision-makers. This would produce domestic and international research agendas that are rooted in policy concerns.

I will turn now to the international agenda, which you may know more about

We started internationally at about same time we did domestically. We obtained seed-funding from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and from the European Commission. Drawing on this support, we pulled together participants from a number of countries and international agencies for a series of meetings in Brussels. At these meetings, we established management structures (recently revised) and organised a first international conference, hosted by the government of Italy (in spectacular fashion) in Milan in November, 1996.

The Milan meeting - to which we invited Ministers of national governments, mayors, senior decision-makers, leading academics and members of NGOs - served the same purpose as our initial domestic conference. It gave us a profile; it established a network; and it allowed us to define our broad strategic interests. These were: a focus on the operations of labour markets and economic participation, including issues around restructuring, competition and low-skilled jobs; a focus on mobility, both social and economic, including questions of tolerance and access, obstacles to mobility and social cohesion (inclusion and exclusion); and a focus on spatial concentration, on neighbourhoods and on the interplay of local, national and international forces and their determinants.

The Milan conference explicitly recognised the importance of cities, noting the devolution of immigration policies to cities in many countries, and posed questions about the capacity of cities to integrate newcomers. It asked whether those capacities were changing, in what ways and why.

In Milan, we set for ourselves the goal of being able to provide to the relevant policymaker, at the national, sub-national, or city level, the policy and program options that are available based on studies of more than one city and more than one country. This was to be the meaning of "best policy practices" and it turned out to be overly ambitious in the short term as our next conference in Copenhagen showed us.

Copenhagen allowed us to strengthen our connections with various cities and it provided people with excellent opportunities to network informally. It did not, however, succeed in creating opportunities for people - research experts and policy experts - to come together around their specific domains of interest in order to add value to each other's ideas. We talked about everything, but at a very general level, so very few opportunities were identified for further collaborative and comparative work - except what occurred accidentally in halls and over lunch.

The next international conference in Israel should be quite different. We did a lot of soul searching after Copenhagen, systematically meeting to gather impressions and to receive suggestions. The result is a new design! (One of our strengths as a project, at home and abroad, has been our willingness to learn, to seek out lessons, and to transform ourselves.) The Israel Conference is based on a boutique model - like modern department stores. There will, of course, still be plenary sessions which emphasise major themes and seek collective engagement but the real work of the conference will take place in the workshops: Not workshops organised by the management team, but rather workshops proposed by member countries - by academics or policymakers from those countries - workshops intended to be like this one in Göteborg. Some sixteen separate workshops are being planned on topics that include: the study of public attitudes toward immigrants and other ethno-racial minorities; barriers to economic participation; ethnic entrepreneurship; second generation youth integration issues; political participation across immigrant and ethno-cultural communities; citizenship and citizenship education; housing and socio-economic mobility; and the role of NGOs in the integration process.

What we are hoping will happen is the following: We are hoping that the events will attract scholars and policymakers from many countries and we are working with our members to promote this. We are hoping that some of the exchanges within workshops will produce durable relationships and that within countries this will bring the project to the critical point of ignition; we are hoping that the networks spawned by the international conference will spin off their own events and work programs; and we are hoping that all the while, we can continue to encourage these interactions, to help with communications and to try, in myriad ways, to extract advice and expertise and to inject these into the public policy process.

1. Metropolis aims to bring the policy and research communities together in a sustained way;
1. The international project is as strong as - but no stronger than its component national projects;
2. Our ultimate goal is to improve public policy by presenting decision-makers with options based on multiple research studies from different countries.

If these ideas appear promising to you, we stand ready to help with logistics, with communications and with ideas. We hope you take up the challenge. It is a matter of will and of work.

Thank you for the invitation and your attention. I wish you luck.