Everyday integration: The Local Contexts, Practices, and Mobilities of Integration

The recent Casey Review (2016) and Integrated Communities Strategy Green Paper (2018) have revived integration as a national policy priority. The problem these strategies address is the perceived lack of integration of immigrants and ethnic minorities. The fix they propose combines English Language provision and the promotion of 'fundamental British values' with curbs on immigration and interventions to address what are viewed as harmful cultural practices.

Whilst most will agree that integration is desirable, there are different views on what integration is and how best to achieve it. Our approach is distinctive in at least three ways.

First, we view integration as a process involving everyone, not just immigrants and ethnic minorities. The drawback of approaches that single out certain populations as 'unintegrated' is that they relieve other, 'integrated' populations of responsibility for integration. Integration, we argue, can only work if it involves everyone, where everyone shares its responsibilities and benefits.

Second, we view integration as beginning in the situated practices and local contexts of everyday life. The drawback of approaches that stress fundamental national values is they trade in abstractions that may have little bearing on people's day-to-day concerns. Integration, we argue, should be pursued and achieved through social intercourse grounded in everyday life, not (only) through the promotion of abstract national values.

Third, we view integration as a bottom-up phenomenon, where the aim of policy should be to capture and encourage existing best practices whilst simultaneously attenuating local barriers to integration. The drawback of approaches pitched at the national level is they are less sensitive to variation in local context. Integration, we argue, must begin with and attend to the specificities of local context.

Our Everyday Integration approach reclaims and retools integration for academic and policy purposes.

Our approach represents a step change in the scholarship on integration. Integration has been criticised for its assimilationist undertones and lack of conceptual clarity, leading some to abandon it in favour of cognate concepts such as incorporation or inclusion. Given integration's continued policy relevance, however, our aim instead is to redefine and reclaim it in ways that identify and then remedy its earlier shortcomings. We begin with integration as an assortment of locally grounded everyday practices and mobilities that facilitate meaningful and constructive social exchange. We will develop this approach as our main scholarly intervention to integration.

Our approach is designed to achieve maximum impact for the everyday users and agents of integration. Integration is not just a matter of fostering good relations between citizens and migrants in national contexts. Rather, integration occurs through the grounded practices, exchanges, and mobilities of everyday life in local contexts. Our policy interventions are designed to capture and facilitate existing good practices whilst simultaneously addressing remaining barriers to integration. Working with the Mayor of Bristol, the Bristol City Council, and a wide range of City and Community Partners, we will use our research findings to co-produce and implement an Integration Strategy for Bristol. We will then distil the insights from our research and Strategy to formulate an Integration Toolkit that can be flexibly adapted for other urban contexts across Britain.

Rather than simply seeing the lack of integration as a problem, we contend that a focus on the ways in which different groups of mobile and settled residents of the city already experience and practice integration - that is, the people who are its everyday architects and agents - can provide insights and creative approaches for scholars and policymakers seeking to understand and foster integration.

One key objective of this project is to engage community partners, policymakers, and academics in collaborative research to co-produce an Integration Strategy for Bristol that will provide an evidence-based, locally grounded approach to promoting integration in the city. This will form the basis for an Integration Toolkit, which will offer a flexible set of principles, methodologies, and insights for other cities to develop their own locally-driven approaches to integration.

The project's aims and design have been developed and agreed through a series of workshops, meetings, and other discussions in 2017-2018 with local government and community organisations. We will continue this collaboration to: share knowledge between academics, practitioners and communities; co-organise Integration Roadshows to canvass local communities on their ideas and concerns about integration; run a series of Integration Workshops with 25 local Partners to shape the project's ongoing implementation; co-produce an Integration Strategy for Bristol; deliver the Integration Strategy to the Mayor of Bristol and Bristol City Council and work with them on a plan for its implementation and continued funding; and develop and disseminate the Integration Toolkit to stakeholders across the UK.

The beneficiaries of the project are the range of Partners in Bristol who are involved in and supporting this project. These include Bristol City Council and the Mayor of Bristol, who have pledged their support for the project and their commitment to collaborating with the research. Together they will ensure the dissemination and implementation of the Integration Strategy for Bristol, linking it with and embedding it in the Mayor's One City Plan for 'a coherent and socially inclusive city'. Our Bristol City Council Partners from the Housing Division, the Department for Neighbourhoods and Communities, the Department for Growth and Regeneration, and the Division of Culture will join the project's Steering Committee to inform the design and implementation of the research and ensure that it addresses the needs of local residents and policymakers.

The project has achieved the support of a wide range of local community organisations and stakeholders, including our four core City Partners: Voscur, Up Our Street, Ashley Community Housing, and the Black South West Network, who will join the project's Steering Committee with responsibility for representing the interests and needs of organisations working on integration issues in the city. Additionally, the project will work with 25 Community Partners, including Babbasa Youth Empowerment, Bristol Disability Equality Forum, Bristol Multi-Faith Forum, Community CoLab, Hartcliffe and Withywood Community Partnership, Refugee Women of Bristol, and United Communities (see Appendix 1 for a full list). These Partners will participate in the Integration Workshops and Roadshows to help develop the research's approach to addressing the concerns and views of diverse communities from across the city. Such commitment from our Bristol Partners ensures that our project is well positioned to achieve real impact on its Integration Strategy and related initiatives in the city to reach some of the project's most important beneficiaries, the people of Bristol.

Additionally, the project will draw on the insights, proposals and lessons learnt from the research and Integration Strategy to create a national Integration Toolkit for national launch and dissemination to other cities across the UK. Our Partner from the Mayor's Office, David Barclay (Good Faith Partnership/Advisor to the Mayor on Social Inclusion), will lead on the launch of the Integration Strategy for Bristol in London and the subsequent dissemination of the Integration Toolkit to local stakeholders in other cities and to national stake-holders, including parliamentarians and civil servants.