New forms of urban gardening are gaining momentum in cities, transforming the conventional use and functions of open, green and public space. They often take place through informal and temporary (re)use of vacant land, as part of greening strategies or social inclusion policy through new modes of land use management, green space governance and collaborative practices. Particular emphasis is placed on shifted meanings of the notion of open public space by referring to its openness to a diversity of uses and users that claim it and relates to the questions of access rights, power relations among actors, negotiations and the so-called right to use and re-appropriate land. By using examples drawn from the Greek and Swiss cases, this chapter underlines differences and similarities in urban gardening practices, social and institutional contexts, collaborative governance patterns, motivations, levels of institutionalisation, openness and inclusiveness of space. More specifically it calls attention to the critical role of the temporary nature of these initiatives in relation to their multifunctional, spatial and socio-political aspects that affect new configurations of urban green areas and public space as well as related planning practices.

The production of urban space and associated neoliberalisation of urban governance limits opportunities for individual and collective freedoms. Such a socio-spatial approach to uneven urban development has influenced a number of authors in their examination of urban community gardens. The research has shown both positive agency and wellbeing benefits of these spaces and also more critical accounts of how the spaces are limited in their ability to truly enhance political freedoms, overcoming asymmetric power relations. In addition to ongoing issues of insecurity of tenure, such well-intentioned community garden initiatives may be seen as light green, weak approaches to urban sustainability rather than a true oppositional discourse of practice, therefore seen to continue neoliberal forms of both unsustainable and uneven development.Using qualitative, visual methods, the chapter focuses on the potential of community gardens to enhance both human agency and ecological sustainability of passive adult users, and active youth and child users in urban areas. The sites chosen are specifically designed with ecological principles and associated features. In order to examine the freedoms valued within these sites, Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach (CA) is operationalised in five such sites in the UK and Ireland. Various critiques of the CA are addressed, and a particular approach to evaluating human wellbeing, linking the sustainable and just use of urban resources is developed. Such a re-conceptualisation of the CA is significant in realising the potential role of the sites in enhancing a more expressive mode of being for individuals, along with the enhancement of participative and critical capacity in urban areas.

The increasing number of metropolitan areas worldwide suggests the need for a more in-depth investigation of metropolitan neighbourhoods in order to explain the complex social dynamics emerging in these new contexts. As a matter of fact, the majority of the existing studies on spatial justice provided analyses and investigations focused on metropolitan settings. However, the issue of spatial justice also involves smaller urban areas and further research is needed in that sense. Our investigation analyses a case study of urban gardening that has been developed with the aim of valorising the central neighbourhood of an Italian mid-size city through proposing participatory planning interventions and requalification of urban sites. The urban gardening initiative has included several actors within the process of implementation. The investigated group of people potentially subjected to the spatial injustice is formed by the residents and the local retailers. A comparison between different stakeholders’ perspectives is provided in order to measure the positive and negative impacts of the initiative on the local community.

This concluding chapter briefly reviews the different, sometime diametric, ways in which the literature conceptualises urban gardening. It brings together enthusiastic approaches that understand urban gardening for its transformative potential to materialise new ideas of cooperation-based relations and sustainable urbanism, and critical approaches that analyse it as another form of greenwash and as another strategy of neoliberal development. The chapter then discusses how the different chapters in the book have come to terms with this gap of understanding urban gardening and the resolutions and new directions for understanding they offer. The chapter concludes with outlining the main contribution of the book to current and future understanding of urban gardening.

The chapter investigates the relationship between urban gardening – as political gesture – and socio-spatial justice. In search for an actually existing just city, gardeners’ everyday initiatives advance a substantive micropolitics of life that point to less visible and sometimes ignored sides of urban governance and planning; and unveil the articulation of different forms of power, dominance and resistance to the unequal distribution of benefits and burdens in space. The critical analysis proposed specifically revolves around the question of whether (and how) urban gardening practices are able to tackle social and spatial injustices. It outlines the consequences, potentialities and contradictions in the constitution of urban spaces and urbanity; and its capability to mitigate material, political and social exclusions, unfairness and inequalities effects. This is complemented with an overview of the contributions comprised in the book.

Previous chapters have looked at community connection, communications and economic development and, through these topics, have touched on mainstream areas of urban planning and governance. However, if welcoming is to move beyond being a relatively niche policy area, we must consider how it can be mainstreamed throughout the city, engaging with the major responsibilities of local authorities for social services and housing and those which crossover with some of its responsibilities, such as education and health. Given the demographic profiles of most UK cities and the increasing presence of newcomers, their inclusion is becoming an important facet of wider municipal goals, such as ending homelessness, tackling child poverty, ‘levelling up’ between cities and regions, and responding to the climate crisis. This chapter considers how services can be ‘inclusive by default’, designed to reduce barriers to access and promote accessibility. It includes examples of where targeted services provide the best way to promote inclusion. It looks at how welcoming can move beyond small, committed groups of staff working directly with newcomers to ways of working throughout a municipality and city, and the challenges inherent in this. Many of the case studies in the chapter draw on learning from the COVID-19 pandemic, a context in which many of the assumptions about what is or isn't possible in supporting newcomers rapidly shifted in the face of new, pressing realities.

The welcoming city is a story as well as a policy. Ideas of identity and belonging are crucial to welcoming, and strategic communications are increasingly seen as policy tools to support integration policy making. This chapter examines key questions about the use of narrative in developing the welcoming city:

• • What do we know about public opinion on migration and integration in the UK and how might this support policy making at the city level?

• • What does research tell us about how our values underpin our understanding of welcoming, and how can understanding this help policy makers to develop narrative strategies?

• • What are the common narratives of welcoming, and how do these help to create the identity of the city and its inhabitants?

• • How might strategic communications help policy makers in developing the welcoming city?

• • Who are the most effective messengers, and what are the most effective messages?

What does ‘good’ look like in developing a shared narrative of welcoming?

This chapter sets out how cities can develop their practice and become welcoming through five core principles. These aren't about specific actions, but the ways of working which will support the city, and its partners, to create change. The aim is to provide a framework for action to consider of some of the key building blocks that need to be in place to create the conditions to support the welcoming city. The five principles are:

• 1. Provide local leadership to create change.

• 2. Make inclusion a shared responsibility, delivered in partnership.

• 3. Work with both newcomers and longer-standing residents.

• 4. Use available data and evidence to understand the local context in order to identify core priorities, set goals, obtain resources, monitor impact and update strategies as needed.

• 5. Take action at the local level, provide advocacy at the national level, and learn from, and contribute to, best practice internationally.

The chapter describes each of these in turn, highlighting examples and pointing out key questions to consider.

Provide local leadership to create change

What does it mean to be a welcoming city? Local authorities and municipalities have direct control over some services and interventions, which can act as levers for change when it comes to integration of newcomers. However, there is also a broader leadership role for the city and for city leaders.

Migration and the welcoming of newcomers are important factors in the growth experienced by most UK cities. Principles of inclusive economic growth aim to maximise the opportunities of all residents to contribute to and benefit from growth, address existing inequalities and ensure that new forms of inequality do not develop. While the welcoming of newcomers is central to growth, it is rarely explicitly included in economic planning or industrial strategy in the UK – often it is barely even mentioned.

In the context of the welcoming city, supporting and driving inclusive economic growth means factoring newcomers into strategic economic planning throughout the system, including in policies related to recruitment and retention, skills development (for example, language acquisition) and promoting entrepreneurialism, thereby capitalising on the skills and assets newcomers bring while mitigating any barriers to access.

The economic contribution of migrants is often a central argument made either in favour of migration or to argue that migration is a drain on resources, but this can often be seen as purely transactional – marking out the benefits or desirability of newcomer communities solely on the basis of potential contribution to gross domestic product (GDP) or growth – rather than a wider conception of welcoming and inclusion that has regard for the distributional and place-based aspects of inclusive economic growth.

Throughout this book, I looked at the challenges for different types of cities in welcoming newcomers and aimed to provide a practical framework for policy makers and practitioners. However, welcoming as a lens has a role beyond providing the overarching framework for policy – it may also prove to be a valuable tool and framework in the ongoing study of urban governance.

Welcoming and urban governance

Many attempts have been made to develop new paradigms of urban governance. The anthropologist Setha Low sets out the various imaginaries and metaphors that we use when thinking about the city, not claiming to present a typology, but offering a guide to the different lenses used to communicate about ‘an often elusive and discursively complex subject’ (Low, 1999). These lenses include the ways that others have thought about and conceptualised the city through a social relations lens (the ethnic city, the divided city, the gendered city, the contested city), economics (the deindustrialised city, the global city, the informational city, the networked city), urban planning and architecture (the modernist city, the postmodern city, the fortress city) and religion and culture (the sacred city, the traditional city; Low, 1999).

More tangibly, we may look to some of the ways in which research has used the formula of ‘the … city’ as a unit for analysis.

‘Nothing about us without us’, a mantra drawn from the disability rights movement, deftly demonstrates the risks of policy development on inclusion from the top down, without including and empowering those affected by those decisions – both newcomers and longer-standing residents. One critique of integration is that it promotes a passive or deficit-based model of newcomer inclusion, in which newcomers are only people to be supported, rather than active citizens who bring resources and assets that can support the civic life of the city. This is particularly pertinent within the discussion of newcomer inclusion, where newcomers can be excluded from the formal mechanisms for participation and therefore must also engage in activist citizenship as well as active citizenship (Isin and Nielsen, 2008), arguing for the ‘right to have rights’ alongside exercising those rights (Arendt, 1973).

This chapter explores the mechanisms for inclusion within policy making, decision making and democratic processes, from representative workforces and electorates to mechanisms for devolving power further to communities through participatory budgeting and community grant making. It explores the barriers to inclusion in these processes that can exist for the newest members of the city, particularly at the moment of arrival, and the role of access to information and advice as gateways to the city and full participation.

Ultimately, this chapter is about power – who holds it, who has access to it and the mechanisms for shifting power in a way that supports newcomer inclusion and welcoming.

Promoting connections between and within communities has long been a focus of social cohesion and welcoming. As a consequence, there is a long-standing and strong research base highlighting the value of intergroup contact in reducing prejudice and promoting inclusion (Allport, 1954; Hewstone and Swart, 2011). Connecting communities also links to one of the core principles of welcoming: involving both newcomers and longer-standing communities in welcoming work.

Promoting intergroup contact is a long-standing interest for policy makers as well, and here the policy context overlaps with the extensive research base. However, this research base has important lessons about the conditions needed for success, including the need for equality among participants who are pursuing common goals and the need to provide the social and institutional backing to ensure that initiatives succeed (Hewstone, 1986).

This final condition is important in understanding of the role of the welcoming city. While it has a role in supporting and enabling intergroup contact, there are significant arguments against a heavy-handed or intrusive approach by a state actor such as a municipality. Indeed, it might even be argued that the state should have no role in engineering contact between groups. There is no research consensus on the role of contact, and there are persistent fears that far from tackling division, a focus on contact only serves to emphasise a sense of ‘us’ versus ‘them’.