Conclusion
Cities stand poised to either let mass migration become an erosive stress or find opportunity within it to create resilient urban landscapes that are stronger, more flexible, and adaptive to the major challenges of the 21st century. As the Network Exchange in Athens and this compendium have shown, collaboration and forming solutions through a lens of resilience are key to realizing this latter potential.
Rather than a catalogue or descriptive report, “Global Migration: Resilient Cities at the Forefront” is a living document, a blueprint for pursuing innovative strategies, partnerships, and solutions that will yield a resilience dividend and allow cities to grow stronger as a result. It showcases best practices, successful strategies and new resources and, just as importantly, lays the groundwork for further work and collaboration.
New populations affect the entire urban ecosystem, rather than any one discrete part of it. Migratory trends themselves have shifted, no longer conforming to past patterns anticipated by humanitarian agencies and their architectures of support. By viewing migration as a phenomenon that cuts across city and humanitarian sectors, governments, NGOs, and private and public stakeholders can rethink their relationships to migration and to one another. They must also integrate it into their planning for a city’s other major shocks and stresses and form new entry points for meaningful change.
Throughout the pages of this compendium, practitioners can find these new paths and begin to chart their own. They can revisit solutions for other challenges and reconceptualize their use; they can utilize the growing body of technological tools and services for mapping and analyzing data; they can coordinate with city sectors previously working in isolation, and form comprehensive strategies that target all vulnerable populations; they can push national actors to reevaluate existing labor laws that might pose undue obstacles to entrance into the economy, stunting the growth of both the city and its residents; and they can look anew at housing and social service policies that may inhibit the absorption of new populations as well as the vitality of a city’s existing residents. And most importantly, they must collaborate to build on what is already a vast arsenal of solutions and experiences.
With this strategic document, we hope to continue the hard work of embracing migrants as part of our future of building urban resilience. Through the collaboration and ingenuity of the Network Exchange’s participants, and their subsequent contributions, we hope to catalyze further solutions and partnerships required for our cities’ future success.
