Vladimir Shopov
Vladimir Shopov

Action often precedes strategy ! The city of Varna may not be actively involved in thinking or developing an Open City strategy but sometimes history counts more than intention. Being a port city for centuries must have taught many lessons to its inhabitants and they are now taking this a step further. With the support of the EU, a centre for immigrants will be opened next month and it will be located, appropriately, in the so-called ‘Greek Quarter’ of the city. The key idea is to offer a number of services at one location. These will include Bulgarian language instruction, familiarization with local culture and custom, housing assistance and employment assistance. There will also be help with legal matters with experienced lawyers coming in to do ‘surgery hours’. The centre will be working with the local police office in facilitating registration and other legal requirements. Initially, the centre will be staffed by two experts and a web administrator with language experts helping when the need arises. So far, language experts in Russian, English and Turkish have been hired. Interestingly, the centre will also be helping ethnic Bulgarians who decide to relocate to the country. Local business will also have a presence as the local labour market seems insatiable even in the current times of economic crisis. The centre itself will predominantly be helping recent migrants and already the organizers are negotiating with local stakeholders on financial support once the EU money has been utilized. All in all, an excellent idea combining external, EU support and local initiative. And who knows….may be a full-blown Open City strategy is not far off !

It is probably somewhat outlandish to link the fall of the Berlin Wall to the whole idea and practice of openness. But the 20^th anniversary of the occasion is suitable for a brief reminder of the incredible exuberance of the sense of freedom which dawned across Eastern Europe on that day. Actually, many of the events leading up to the event had a great deal to with the desire to travel freely, to exchange and share, to develop and explore what is different, what is non-native. The thousands of East Germans and East Europeans who celebrated on that day were enthused about the opportunity to cross borders, to engage and find friends, colleagues, etc. Today, this is mundane, a fact of life unworthy of much notice or talk. Freedom to travel has become a daily fact for EU citizens and this is being expanded, finally, to many countries in South East Europe who are not in the EU. It is regrettable that so few people still make use of the opportunity to work and live in another EU country (roughly 4%). But the opportunity is there and we should be reminded of it and the fact that almost one half of previously divided Europe can now enjoy that freedom too. 20 years is a long time but it is biographical time, it can fit into a person’s life. Yet, future anniversaries will be more befitting for the history books, 25 years is a historical category. In my view, this makes this year’s occasion special as it may be the last one that we can celebrate without lapsing into the historical. Let’s be reminded of the event, of the exhilaration and hope that mark it to this day!

While openness, strategy, policy, etc. are important and necessary conceptual tools for all of us attempting to create such spaces, every once in a while we need to be reminded of the little problems, difficulties and pleasures of living and working in unfamiliar surroundings. Getting policy frameworks and city efforts right is important and crucial if we wish to see progress being made towards the opening of towns and making them hospitable for migrants. There are some big debates to be had and some important changes to be achieved in terms of mentality, political drive and organizational reform. But knowing how migrants lead their lives day to day is just as informative and helpful. This is where various blogs, forums and sites come in. Web 2.0 coming to the rescue of city planners and shakers……Not surprisingly, Bulgaria also has quite a few of these and they are full of interesting ideas, suggestions and experiences. One of the most popular sites is a portal providing all sorts of advices, tips and experiences for expats. Much in these forums has to be with basic day-to-day issues such as language problems, company registration, travel and real estate. These provide useful insight into the problems migrants face when confronted with daily life in the country. At a minimum, such sites need to be used as sources of information by city authorities. At a maximum, there should be regular occasions for exchange of information and dialogue between expat organizations and the authorities. This is invaluable and will do a great deal towards making Sofia a more hospitable place. But beyond the big questions and issues, such forums help you enjoy the little things in life as well…like finding out where to buy decent sherry for a drink with friends…..

There is a great temptation to think of open cities as maturing out of non-intervention. In other words, we might simply assume that all we need to do is to simply create a level playing field in a city and await the arrival of openness. Here, lack of intervention and assuring a laissez faire approach are deemed necessary to ensure openness. Clearly, removing existing obstacles of various types is an important and necessary first step. For instance, in a post-communist setting this has meant liberalization of visa regimes, permitting access to the country, opening to foreign trade and investment, etc. Such changes have also affected our states internally. All limitations on choosing where to settle and live within the country were immediately removed following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Nationals and non-nationals enjoy the freedom to settle and live wherever they please and cities have benefitted greatly from this. Capital cities in post-communist Europe were the first to attract not only own internal migrants but also people from other countries, regions and continents. So, it is little surprise that when it comes to openness many people continue to think that removing the old obstacles of settlement is enough. Ensuring non-intervention in this regard is deemed sufficient.

Well, openness does require more than simply refraining from creating hinderances. For one thing, formal freedoms are not enough as the right to settle needs to be complemented by efficient and friendly public services and attention to diversity. Managing openness entails creating new services for new communities, nurturing a sense of welcoming and appreciation of diversity, recalibrating already existing public services and crafting new spaces within cities. Openness will not be created by simply translating signs in other languages or doing the odd cultural event to register official acknowledgement of diversity. Going beyond laissez-faire in this sense is a precondition for the real opening up of cities, openness is not simply an absence of obstacles, it is a sustained, ‘across the board’ effort to welcome and accommodate diversity and difference to make it work for a city.

I think this is a legitimate question even though at first sight it looks like a non-issue. Clearly, if individuals and families find hospitable environment in which to reside, work and have fun they will tend to remain for longer periods of time and even consider settling. Fulfilling this line of behavioural expectation must be the task of every city attempting to enhance its attraction and ‘pulling power’. But the temporal dimension of the openness strategy is more complex than this. In order to have a successful sustainable openness strategy, cities ought to become centres for diversity and cultural and economic vibrancy which emerge or are enhanced but must last as such. Otherwise, we are faced with the phenomenon of fleeting, flash attractiveness, an urban equivalent of ’15 minutes of fame’ during which people flock but then disperse. Cities may benefit from instant waves of interest thrown at them by various circumstances but they must also be able to craft longer-term ways of creating friendly, culturally and economically habitable places. This is a crucial point for locations which are not immediately seen as particularly popular places of openness. A city like Sofia is a case in point. There are some estimates that Sofia boasts about 5 000 top executives and managers at the present times of non-Bulgarian origin. But chances are most of these people are likely to move on in their careers in the next 2-3 years. It is hard to see a city becoming sustainably open without the creation of relatively stable communities of non-nationals. Interesting data and analysis on British ex-pats may be found in a recent survey. Poignantly, it shows that British ex-pats tend cluster and remain longer if located in the countryside.

P.S. The picture is of the city of Veliko Tarnovo, preferred by many ex-pats from the UK.

An interesting project is coming to an end in Bulgaria. Sofia University is at the core of the project entitled “Travelling Square” which has two main purposes. The first one is to use the academic institution is an intermediary and multiplier of dialogue between local authorities, civic organizations and the central state on questions of migration. The second is to simply focus and initiate informed policy debates about the enormous scale of migration in the country. Apart from the various discussions and meetings, some very interesting themes have been explored such as the linkage between development and migration in border areas and the role of trans-border employment, the social impact of the American University on the city of Blagoevgrad where it is located, the impact of ‘brain drain’ in regional cities and possible courses of action to counter it, the benefits of migration for Black Sea coast cities, etc. Overwhelmingly, the focus of the project is on internal migration and does not specifically address the policy of open cities, yet stimulating migration policy debates is a first and unavoidable step before the more complex and multi-level concepts of migration management can be formulated. Redefining emigration cities as open cities is an important opportunity here as is the opportunity to create ‘open regions’ where the pull factor of any one particular city is not sufficient. The Black Sea coastal areas represent just such an opportunity. The organizers have promised the publications of the project reports in the near future. Watch this space for some highlights. The ‘Travelling Square’ project has been funded by the Trust for Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe.

Cities embed their idea of openness in their self-descriptions. In other words, increasingly one encounters portraits of cities which contain the elements of opening, diversity, innovation, cultural vibrancy. The language used to describe locations is now permeated with these ideas. A good case in point is the city of Basel, which has in fact been implementing for years a conscious strategy of openness. Ample evidence of this may be found in the website of the city. In its introduction and portrait we read its own self-definition: ‘small city of global format’. Further, the website visitor learns of the many attractions of the location: proximity to other countries and cultures, vibrant business environment and innovation hubs. While the context is crucial, the personal is not forgotten. People move not just due to opportunity but also due to quality of life considerations. Hence, Basel offers much in the way of leisure and recreation, enticing cuisine, open, green space. Discursively, this is an open city. Actually, this is the easy part, it should not be too difficult to come up with a convincing self-description. The hard bit is for it to actually represent a reality!

‘Oldness’ is a much celebrated feature of city history. Wherever we go, we are conveyed some sort of an official version about the antiquity, roots, centuries-long histories of cities. Durability seemed the ultimate evidence of worth. Not surprisingly then, most efforts to restructure and promote cities place this factor at the centre, survival of a settlement is treated as proof of wisdom, adaptability and capacity to change. Sofia is no exception and has a long history of boasting about its past going back to pre-Roman days. Some decades ago even the official slogan of the city touched on this theme. It still goes: ‘Sofia – It Grows but It Does Not Grow Older’.

The enormous expansion of Sofia during the communist era between the 1950 and 70s was mainly due to large-scale industrialization, eventually bringing the tally to above 1 million inhabitants. The fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent market reforms led to enormous social and economic displacement bringing to the capital a further million from other towns and cities feeling economic breakdown. In these circumstances, history and city management took a back seat to the sheer size and speed of population increase. These have stabilized now and more and more people are turning to history to restore some perspective. Two initiatives are interesting in this context. Sites and blogs dedicated to old Sofia have been springing up, some containing really interesting information and visual materials. Even a commercial bank has decided to jump on this bandwagon and has recently started an open-air photo exhibition around the city. This is good start !

The migration policy of national governments is decisive for what cities can and cannot do with their open city strategy. This is particularly true for highly centralized systems such as that of Bulgaria. So when the global crisis set in, it was only a question of time before the government decided to tighten its policy. The proposals being currently discussed include such measures as an increase from 15 to 30 days of advertising for a job opening before a non-EU national may be considered for the position. Further, rather than advertising locally labour bureaus will be required to do so nationally in the hope that another Bulgarian from a distant city might want to move and apply for the job. More worryingly, a ‘labour mediator’ will be present at interviews to make sure that the qualities of the Bulgarian applicant are not ‘underrated’. If your firm is in a region and branch which exceed by 0.5% the average unemployment, your request for hiring a non-EU national might actually be turned down. Moreover, the same is likely to happen if a company has made significant redundancies in the last six months. A work permit may be extended to one year only if that person is employed at a site of ‘national importance’, i.e. motorways, large infrastructure projects, etc.

The number of people involved is not enormous, only 1100 non-EU nationals have received work permits since the start of the year. These are mainly Turkish and Russian employees, but curiously, given the usual concentration of Chinese nationals in the big cities, one Chinese citizen has applied for the job of a tractor operator. I was unable to find out whether he/she actually got the job.

BBC World Service has commissioned an analysis on the impact of the global recession on migration. The findings have just been published and make for a very interesting reading. The survey is done by the Migration Policy Institute based in Washington DC and looks in detail at patters of worldwide migration, major migration corridors, the extent of reduction of migration in various economies, the different policy responses to the crisis, etc. Particularly useful is the list of sources at the end of the report which allows us to pursue further the various lines of enquiry. Enjoy it !

Let me welcome you to this blog. I will be posting on various issues whose main idea will be to examine and promote the open city concept. But this will be done not just by presenting various angles to this but rather by trying to create a platform where we can interactively move in this direction. There will be posts tackling conceptual issues, administrative matters, the leadership question. Also, I will be posting personal stories to remind ourselves of the individual dimension of an open city as well as some academic angles which guide the daily work on creating open cities. I look forward to your comments and contributions.

For over a decade, saying that we live in an open world would be stating the obvious. The story of these last years has been one of dismantling walls, barriers, obstacles to travel, business and information. Indeed, for many people the global era we inhabit is all about openness and opportunity to interact. It is a vital sign of the times, to be embraced and enjoyed. Yet, somehow this attitude creates a peculiar complacency for if openness defines our times, it is simply there. It is a feature of our daily lives in little need of our attention. The concept of open cities counters this complacency as it does quite the opposite. It does not take openness for granted, it does not rely on some force of nature which removes various obstacles to greater interaction and diversity. Open cities are about recognizing the need to harness them, to focus on actually creating the urban spaces of openness.

Living in a global world then means that we must recognize the difference between absence of insurmountable obstacles to interact and the need to foster an urban environment which fully accommodates openness. In other words, it will never be enough to simply say ‘yes, people can come to our country or city and enjoy our hospitality and culture’. To make this a meaningful, transformative effort, cities and their citizens do need structured policies and approaches to harness and make diversity work for them. This is not an easy task. We are accustomed to nations, states, regions having different strategies about development, culture, policy. For many, many decades cities were simply a subset, an afterthought in the big policy debates of our societies. The territory of the state was given more preference, greater attention and resources. But cities have come of age in the global era. They are magnets often quite independent of the surrounding state, often they are the prime reason why people move from one place to another.

So, being open in an open world does not come into being simply by virtue of our being part of it. City governments, citizens, administrators, mayors need to make a concerted effort to harness openness and create the right conditions for it to work. At times, this means change of focus and greater awareness and attention to issues which used to be the terrain of national governments. Affecting such change also entails realizing that local is just as important as global and that people increasingly seek diversity and difference in their immediate surroundings rather than in the distanced portraits of the open global world.

Open cities are mainly about urban space, about city space managed and changed to foster diversity, about rearranging city culture and institutions. Everywhere we look, we are likely to efforts which are centred on changing that unit, the city. But building open cities in Europe is also increasingly about building open regional spaces where you find clusters of such cities in relative proximity. Here openness extends beyond one individual city and can be seen as a regional strategy for harnessing diversity and making it attractive for migrants. This has been the case with the city of Zurich where regional diversity extending into surrounding regions and countries was an element of its strategy to make the city attractive. I have just come across two other interesting instances which are relevant in this context.
The first one is of greater relevance and relates to the so-called ‘Euro-metropole’ established recently among three cities in different jurisdictions: Lille, France, Kortrijk, Flanders, Belgium and Tournai, Wallonia, Belgium.

These cities have come together to establish themselves as a legal entity and now provide joint, regional services without their home states having to enter complex international agreements. They are represented on the principle of parity and all layers of government participate: local, regional and national. Common activities range from dealing with cross-border crime to regional infrastructure projects. The academic research cluster in Lille has particularly benefited from the creation of this regional space, thereby contributing to its own city strategy of development. The same holds for the other two cities which are becoming increasingly attractive due to this political innovation. Conceptually, the whole project is mainly about cities and their transformation in a globalized world. Such a regional dimension appears to be particularly important for smaller cities which are attempting to open themselves. In a way, regional attractiveness is a crucial asset, compensating the lack of lure characteristic for the bigger metropolitan cities of the world.
http://euobserver.com/9/28282
The second instance is a somewhat less obvious one but important in the effort to position region-making as a city asset. It is a business project to build a huge hard rock café hotel and casino complex in western Hungary near Budapest but also close to the cities of Vienna, Austria and Bratislava, Slovakia. The construction of the complex near the borders of the three countries is planned in such a way as to expand its ‘catchment area’. The idea builds on a vibrant tradition of employee commuting in this part of Central Europe and is clearly intended to ‘region-make’ and foster the attractiveness not just of the site of the investment but also of the three big cities nearby. Another interesting attempt to use the regional dimension as a tool for making cities more dynamic, vibrant and open.

http://www.hardrockhotels.com/GenericPages.aspx?process=news/hard_rock_hotel__casino_hungary!.html

An interesting survey was just published by KEA European Affairs, Brussels looking at the linkage between culture, creativity and prosperity. The study is commissioned by the European Commission and its central task is to see how development and prosperity are influenced by culture and under what conditions culture is best employed to create value. The report places culture-based creativity at the core of the post-industrial economy and prosperity. The key findings of the final report can be found at:
http://www.keanet.eu/impactcreativityculture.html

The report makes for an interesting reading. A great deal of attention is paid to the importance of art and an education environment, which breeds the artistic and the creative. Rightly, the survey insists that the learning environment is key and much reform is needed there in order to fully use it. There is even talk of learning environment reform. Openness is duly mentioned as are other important factors such as developing new personal skills (developing lateral and non-linear thinking). I think there is also important, and refreshing emphasis on technical skills which are all too often sidelined.

Curiously, when implicitly ranked social environment is listed in third place and it remains quite underdeveloped in the overall report. Openness and diversity are mentioned but not really developed as decisive factors in the breeding of innovation-oriented culture. Somehow, developing ‘new ways of seeing things’ and ‘openness for the new’ remain as mainly personal endeavor and task rather than a feature of social life, which needs particular attention and breeding in itself. The report is mainly aimed, it seems, at developing educational policy rather than urban or migration policy and it serves this task well with excellent examples of individual artistic and creative brilliance. Interesting examples from business (Virgin, Polygram and others) are cited making strong claims in favour of improved educational policy.

Reading the report of KEA, I was reminded of the difficulty of simultaneously developing a series of policies all aimed at enhancing openness, creativity and value creation. Education policy is truly central as without an openness-oriented policy at this level, we can hardly expect to suddenly encounter enlightened citizens who value openness and its implications later in their lives. In other words, an education policy based on enhancement of creativity and openness is a must if we really want to have communities which make way for and enjoy difference and then understand the value that it brings.

The appearance of a network of sites and efforts to take the open cities concept is central to any success we might want to have. This is why I have been very interested in finding more about such platforms and the impact that they have on local businesses, authorities and other interested partners. One such platform I want to recommend to everyone is the Cities of Migration site - http://citiesofmigration.ca/lang/en/ It is great on fresh ideas being tried out in various parts of the world, on policy cases and open city type events, etc. There is also an e-library full of various resources on diversity.

The Cities of Migration site also has lots of recorded webinars which showcase various ideas and projects done by cities around the world. I recently listened to an interesting one on integrating immigrants into local economies.  -

One of the most helpful reminders was that in fact migrants these days are in their vast majority urban migrants. In other words, very few people who come to our countries wish to settle in the countryside. On closer inspection, this is an obvious point to make but it is almost incredible how official and policy discourse ignores this reality. Public debate is almost constantly focused on illegal migration and then, people who settle and then enter employment are mostly described as an off-shot of this phenomenon.

This is rather important. Immigration needs to be talked about not just in law enforcement terms but in cultural, urban and market terms. And I feel that in most societies we see that the former is the case. Increasingly, in this age of risk and uncertainty, migration is publicly seen in such context. To counter that, organizations and individuals keen on supporting and promoting diversity will need to devise strategies to promote a different angle on migration. And do that in cooperation with the electronic and printed media. Local authorities and business organizations will need to help enrich the context in which our societies talk about immigration. This will not be easy. Cities are constantly in dialogue with national authorities about the various aspects of migration policy and this sometimes perpetuates this problem of seeing migrants solely in such terms. To counter this, we are going to have help portray migrants as people contributing to wealth creation and culture enrichment. Putting real faces next to policy talk is a good way of doing just that.