Closing borders, building walls, attacking migrants … one of Europe’s main goals, the freedom of movement, is in danger these days. Can the URBACT experience of multinational exchanges help overcome this threat?
While Central and Eastern Europe’s middle-aged and older generations still have vivid memories of closed borders and the iron curtain, as well as limited opportunities to build a satisfying career and fulfil their professional calling, for the younger generation the European Union became a reality and is almost one (unified) country with wide opportunities in which they can travel, learn, and grow personally and professionally. Yet, migration within the EU has its risks and potential conflicts. With the removal of internal borders, the free movement of people from one country to another increasingly becomes an everyday routine. However, people are sensible to the increase of migration from other countries into their neighbourhood. This is partly understandable as the long-time neighbours face families from other EU countries they never visited.
URBACT is one of the rare examples of EU financed programmes where the mix of better-off and poorer cities is compulsorily required: in each of the networks half of the partners have to come from the better-off (competitiveness) regions while the other half from the lagging-behind (convergence) regions. Why is this so important? To make it very simple, let us only differentiate expert (technical) and everyday (common sense) knowledge. The ‘more developed’, richer cities are usually more advanced regarding expert knowledge. However, this often leads to less attention taken to everyday knowledge. The common feature of these is that the technically more advanced but also more regulated, rigid systems in North Western European cities differ substantially of the less regulated systems of Eastern European cities. In the latter everyday knowledge plays a larger role as a substitute of the missing public frameworks…