Web of Life

Migration is leading to a new colour-coding that can be dangerous for city life, a new report warns.

The state of the world's cities report from a UN-Habitat report published Tuesday suggests that ''a city is both a territory and an attitude, and this attitude is culture''.

Migration is taking new people around the world's cities but the great weakness of the cities is ''a slowness to absorb them in the micropolitics of everyday life, in both public spaces and private institutions,'' the report says.

''Migration has an impact on settlement patterns,'' UN-Habitat executive director Anna Tibajuka told IPS. ''We need to promote awareness that in the end you want inclusive cities, not cities with exclusion zones. But unfortunately that is the trend. New migrants are sent into separate neighbourhoods and condemned to live there. This is not in anyone's interests, but this exists.''

The mix is a measure of both the success and failure of globalisation, the report says. ''This needs to be countered by a deliberate policy of planning inclusive cities, and we are in constant conversation with city authorities,'' Tibajuka said.

The report was released to inform the World Urban Forum being held in Barcelona this week. Appropriately, because Barcelona is something of a model city, Tibajuka says.

''Barcelona has been able to renew itself very quickly,'' she said. ''It was the city of Christopher Columbus, which must make it the home of globalisation. Barcelona is not building typical ghettos, it has intentional plans to integrate.''

City planning can be the foundation for building a decent society, Tibajuka says. ''City planning can be a tool to counter racism -- or to encourage racism,'' she said. ''Therefore we are against kinds of zoning.''

City planning can also help break class barriers, she said. ''A low income suburb is a disaster. Within a block or within cooperative housing we should put people of different income groups together. Because once prejudices settle in people's minds, it is very difficult to get rid of them. People become what they are socialised to be.''

Some 3,000 delegates representing governments, local authorities, non-governmental organisations and other experts are participating in the urban forum in Barcelona Sep. 13-17. Planning inclusive cities will be at the heart of discussions. The theme of this year's forum is: Cities: Crossroads of cultures, inclusiveness and integration?

Separate ethnic spaces often take the form of ethnic ghettos but also ''culturally distinct non-residential spaces such as shops and restaurants,'' the report says. ''This has given rise to some fundamental challenges about how to manage multicultural cities.''

Many cities are officially multicultural but ''they do not fully understand how to integrate ethnic minorities without fear of losing their historic cultural identity,'' the report says.

''In fact, despite cities' presumed air of tolerance and real social diversity, they have always been flashpoints of ethnic hostility. The density of different minority populations makes it easy to target their homes and shops for persecution,'' says the report. The report says that ''although immigrants and ethnic minorities achieve recognition for infusing new music and foods within urban culture, employers, the police and the broader public are often all too ready to turn against them.''

The Barcelona forum is has specific ways of addressing these problems on its agenda.
''International networks of cities and the urban professions can play an invaluable role in disseminating best practice, experiences and the many debates about these issues,'' the report says.
Beyond the Barcelona forum such issues are being addressed by the recently formed United Cities and Local Authorities group, which has launched in turn the Global Observatory on Local Democracy (GOLD). - (IPS)