Migration shapes cities - their everyday lives, their images and their political debates. The event organized by the Collaborative Research Centre "Production of Migration" (SFB 1604) in the university building at Seminarstraße 20, room 15/E16, will show the extent to which issues of coexistence, municipal governance and public perception are intertwined.
The starting point is the ongoing public debate on migration, which has recently received new attention with controversies about the "cityscape". Discussions about "problem neighborhoods" or "ghettos" are by no means new - nor are local political attempts to actively shape migration and integration processes. As early as the 1970s and 1980s, many municipalities saw the increasing presence of migrants primarily as a problem. A change in perspective came in 1989 with the founding of the Office for Multicultural Affairs (AmkA) in Frankfurt am Main, which set itself the goal of actively moderating and dealing with social conflicts in the context of migration - also based on the findings of the migration research that was becoming established at the time.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, founder of the AmkA and former Frankfurt city councillor (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen), and political scientist Prof. Dr. Claus Leggewie (Justus Liebig University Giessen), who provided academic support during the founding process of the office, will talk about these experiences and their relevance today. In 2025, they jointly published the book "Zurück zur Wirklichkeit. A Political Friendship" (Wagenbach), in which they reflect on their experiences and activities.
After a review of the multiculturalism debates of the 1980s and the practice of the AmkA in the 1990s, both will discuss past, present and future developments in urban migration policies with the audience at the event. "The example of the Office for Multicultural Affairs shows the new approaches that municipalities developed over 35 years ago to actively shape the way they deal with migration and coexistence in cities - approaches that were often in conflict with migration policies at federal level," explains David Templin, who is researching the history of the Frankfurt AmkA in the Collaborative Research Center.
Further information on the SFB 1604:
https://www.uni-osnabrueck.de/sfb1604
Further information for editors:
Dr. David Templin, Osnabrück University
Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS)Collaborative Research Centre 1604 "Production of Migration"
dtemplin@uni-osnabrueck.de
