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’.

How a city welcomes migrants gives us an insight that allows us to understand the city, as a place of arrival and as a place of inclusion. It can be a framework for analysis and a very human way of understanding the process of migration as it is felt by people, both the newcomers and the longer-standing residents of the city.

This book aims to conceptualise this welcoming process in relation to the city, drawing on academic research, policy and practice. It draws substantially from a seven-year programme of research and knowledge exchange called Inclusive Cities, a network of 12 UK cities that worked with academic researchers to improve their understanding of welcoming and inclusion and translate that research base into policies and practical action at the local level. The programme, developed in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, was co-developed by cities and researchers in response to a perceived gap in city-level practice. City leaders increasingly felt responsibility to support and promote newcomer inclusivity and to respond to risks to community cohesion, but did not feel they had the framework or resources to respond to these challenges. The programme provided a framework for learning between the cities, from the research base and with international peers.