Metropolis Objectives and Aims of the Conference
Meyer Burstein
Metropolis co-chair, Canada
Dpt. Of Citizenship and Immigration Canada

I would like to begin on behalf of the Metropolis International Steering Committee by thanking our Italian Hosts and the many committed individuals who have worked so hard to realize this conference.
I want to thank them for their vision, for their confidence that we could bring Metropolis to life and for their generosity in hosting this important event.
I believe that none of you will be sorry that you have taken the time to come here. Though you should know that the outcome depends mostly on you.
Right from the beginning, Metropolis has been a cooperative effort and we are counting on this same spirit to sustain us for the next two and a half days.
All of us, have a stake in the success of this conference.
Some as organizers; some as contributors; but all as citizens of states that are struggling with migration.
Struggling to do the right thing.
To respond fairly, compassionately and, at the same time, sensibly to a global phenomenon that will, in the years to come, and faster than most people anticipate, increase in size, in complexity and in the challenge it presents domestically and internationally.
In approximately 15 minutes - we will turn away from process - which is my subject -and we will concentrate our attention on the substance of this conference.
On the issues that bring us together and on the strategic directions, the policy directions and research directions, that we will want to pursue, collectively, in the future.
This is not a conference where you will be told what those issues are or what directions ought to be pursued.
Instead, you will be asked.
You are the experts and the practitioners in this field.
And so, we are asking you to tell us what the most pressing issues are. And where knowledge can improve public policy.
My job, this morning, is mechanical: it is to lay out the engineering of this Project.
And to tell you how this Conference fits into the overall template.
At various times, people have referred to Metropolis as a network... as an international partnership... or, simply... as a series of events.
And it is all of these things. But to describe the Project in this way misses its key dynamic feature.
Because what we are really building with Metropolis is an engine - an intellectual engine built for the purpose of problem solving.

Metropolis is:

• First and foremost, a comparative, policy-research project whose aim is to improve public policy. Our overarching project goal is to situate knowledge at the centre of decision-making.
• Our focus is on cities - it is on the integration of migrants in cities and on the transformation of cities by those same migrants.

The way we intend to work is as follows: we intend to build a network of researchers and decision-makers.
We will create a policy thrust by continually involving governments and stakeholders in project design and problem definition.
And we intend to energize this network and to focus it through conferences, through participation in policy forums and through strategic communication, including a reliance on new technologies.
We are still in our youth.

Metropolis Project - the international phase - started just a little over two years ago. Not as a high level, government exercise.
But as a grass roots initiative supported by faith and sustained by seed funding from the European Commission and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
It began as a punctuated discussion among individuals who would get together, periodically, at international meetings.
Meetings where it became clear that behind our national differences, behind our different valuations and our different remedies, there existed a set of core beliefs that bound us together.
These beliefs are the foundation of the Metropolis Project.
And it is to these beliefs that we want to bolt our policy-research engine.
More than anything else, what unites us, the Metropolis partners, is our conviction that it will take vision, creativity and leadership to respond to the extraordinary challenges posed by migration.
Challenges to our economies; challenges to our public and private institutions; and, most of all, challenges to our ability to promote and maintain cohesive and harmonious societies. Societies that can mobilize to address the kinds of changes that globalization and technology are producing. Societies that are able to bridge the concerns and aspirations of both the migrants and the host population.

Equally important in our view is knowledge.
We urgently need policy focused research to provide us with the analytical foundations, with the policy options and with the arguments that will allow us to manage migration thoughtfully and effectively.
And it is not just governments that need this knowledge.
Because it is not just governments that are implicated in the task of managing migration.
Governments (generally national governments), control, or try to control, migration flows But they do not control the entire range of institutional and private machinery that is needed to respond those flows.
This machinery belongs to a larger community - the community of stakeholders - who play a vital role, along with governments, in brokering the integration process. And it is this community, as well as national governments, that needs knowledge!

The third element, along with a belief in leadership and knowledge, that unites the Metropolis partners is our conviction that migration cannot be managed without international cooperation - cooperation on the policy front and cooperation on the research front.
We need international comparative research in order to sort out the effectiveness and appropriateness of our domestic policies and programs.
And we need to exchange information about best practices.
About the most effective responses to the practical challenges that face us in our cities.
Collectively, we - the Metropolis partners - hold a portfolio of such policy and program solutions.
The stocks in this portfolio may be conservative and blue chip. Some are high yield and high risk. They may even be bankrupt. But they all have experimental value.
And while the strategies employed by one country can rarely be transferred, in their entirety, to another, elements of those strategies can, and should, be traded.
So much for the grand design.

I would now like to turn to our goals for Milan.
Milan as you all know, is the first in a series of planned international conferences.
I can say this with confidence - first in a series - because we already have commitments for at least three more conferences, something you will be hearing about over the next few days
In any event Milan is first, and because of this, it is also different.
There is, at this point, in the Project, no original research to share because we have not yet established a research agenda. This job falls to you... So while most people come to conferences as consumers, our plans call for you to become producers.
You are here to work! To set the strategic research agenda of the Metropolis Project.
And the conference has been carefully and, we think, creatively - engineered to achieve this purpose.
The conference has four key stages which are cumulative.
In the first stage, the challenges and opportunities created by international migration will be developed.
Not in a theoretical way.
But from a practical, hands-on perspective.
The perspective of political leaders - national and urban - who must confront the issues raised by migration.
Confront them and make balanced decisions.
Following this, in the next stage of the conference, we will attempt to contextualize the issues.
Our expert academic panel will situate migration in the larger framework of urban restructuring and transformation.
The aim here is to provide a clearer sense of the forces at play. It is also to provide a better appreciation of the scope that exists for policy management.
After this, we break into groups, each focused on one of the four overlapping topics identified in the program:

• urban economic restructuring and what this entails for the integration of immigrants, especially for marginalized populations;
• the social integration of migrants and the implications this has for public and private institutions;
• the impact of changing demographics on social cohesion and, thus, on our ability to do the things that need doing;
• and, finally, the management of diversity with a focus on access and equity in a variety of policy domains.

These topics were chosen by our international steering committee after extended discussion - not with a view to developing clean borders among the issues, to bring out the major challenges and opportunities invented by migration.
It is inside the four groups that the critical work of this conference will have to take place. So, I want to make a special plea and ask you to discipline yourselves.
To resist the temptation to engage in unproductive polemic.
Because time is limited and each group has a big job in front of it.
We have a saying in North America: "Keep your eyes on the ball", meaning "focus on the objective". Each group - you should think of yourselves as a team - is charged with three things: with identifying the key issues in their domain; with assessing the state of academic knowledge; and with developing an agreed list - hopefully a consensus list - of policy - research priorities.
Not projects, but strategic directions.
These priorities are what we want you to report back to the plenary session on Friday.
There, a panel of current and former ministers of immigration along with senior officials will provide their perspectives on the priorities.
The litmus test will be pragmatism! Pragmatism leavened by creativity.
In the final session, my Steering Committee co-chair and colleague, Demetrios Papademetriou, will pull together the emergent, strategic, policy-research directions that will occupy Metropolis and breathe life into the Project.
So while this final session marks the end of the Conference, it also sets in motion a much larger process.
Against the strategic directions identified by you - by us - here in Milan, Metropolis will organize international working teams.
Teams whose job it will be to develop comparative research projects.
And it is for these projects that we will seek national and international support. Projects focused on the collective priorities and the decision needs you have identified.
So in closing, let me summarize, in three sentences, the Metropolis Project:

1. Our ultimate goal is to create a policy-research engine where decision-making is fuelled by knowledge;
2. We intend to accomplish this by creating a network of knowledge producers and knowledge consumers and involving them deeply in Project design;
3. We intend to energize the network through events like this, by creating opportunities for contact, and through extensive, leading edge communication.

This Conference is now in your hands.
Thank you.

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