Forlì (IT) and the Union of surrounding towns were faced with the challenge of managing a high number of asylum seekers in a centralised way. Confronted with the burden of social services, plus the negative reactions of the press and the inhabitants, the Union put in place a territory-wide approach to welcoming them. Their aim: integrate the asylum seekers in local communities based on the availability and resources in each town of the Union.
By sharing information, mutualising knowledge and a joint management system, the Union succeeded in building a widespread welcoming system for asylum seekers over its entire territory. Spillover effects: it avoided ghettoisation and speculation on the migration phenomenon.

The Municipality of Forlì and the “Unione dei comuni della Romagna forlivese“ (hereinafter “Union”) good practice adopt a sustainable approach in the Union to deal with the asylum seekers problem, promoting an integration of asylum seekers in local communities of the Union and organising them in "small groups". This allows a proper and regulated welcome and avoid negative social impacts. The Municipalities, through ASP - Azienda Pubblica dei Servizi alla Persona - (the public company for individual services), will welcome and support asylum seekers, according to its own available resources and funds, by integrating its services with services dedicated to an efficient hospitality. They will share information on how to offer hospitality to asylum seekers and how to manage it in their local context. They encourage and increase integration. For instance, a neighbourhood committee is working alongside with asylum seekers to take care of the common areas. They seek and promote the involvement of citizens in order to ensure social cohesion and territorial development. The ASP coordinates the widespread welcome system in close collaboration with the municipalities, with the national government through the prefecture and with third sector organisations, who run the shelters.

In 2014, the “Unione dei comuni della Romagna forlivese“ (the Union) was founded. Fifteen Municipalities of the Forlì-Cesena Province, which includes Forlì itself, are part of this Union. The aim of the Union is: to improve services, to guarantee equal access to services for the residents of the Union and to promote and coordinate the well balanced development of the territory for the benefit of future generations. Thus, the Union has a sustainable and integrated approach to solving problems in its own territory. The good practice tackles the urban challenge of asylum seekers through: • The coordination and management of hospitality in the Union; • The adoption of an operators network - with different skills - by giving them a share of resources for cross-cutting projects (emergency, job placement, sports...). The good practice is built on the sustainable and integrated approach to tackle the urban problem and management of asylum seekers, in line with URBACT's principles of sustainable urban living. The good practice is based on measures designed for the social inclusion of asylum seekers.

Municipalities of the Union are all involved in the Widespread Hospitality project. The Union held a jointly weekly meeting with the aim to share information, to oversee the situation, to discuss on how to manage problems, to find solutions to offer hospitality to asylum seekers and to manage it in their local context. A framework agreement between among parties (public, private and social areas) has been established. The agreement provides socially useful activities for involving asylum seekers. Those activities are accompanied by citizens. Thus, several neighbourhood committees are part of the project and they work alongside with the asylum seekers to organise the joint care of the common areas, in order to encourage and increase integration. Eventually, the local police are constantly involved.

We have a model of welcome and hospitality which works with integration, in order to avoid ghettoisation and speculation on the migration phenomenon. The effectiveness of our good practice is that we do not concentrate asylum seekers in one place, but we address them in several different places located in the Union area. This kind of organisation facilitates inclusion and integration, avoiding the arising of fear and tensions in the local population. In this way, the professionals involved are able to work professionally, trying to achieve full inclusion. Moreover, the placement of asylum seekers in the Union area is also possible thanks to a detailed mapping of all the structures which accept to host migrants. The opening of the centres is shared with ASP, which is the official coordinator, and then the prefecture is alerted. The least densely populated areas are preferred, in order to avoid concentration in the common centres. Before this project, asylum seekers were seen as invaders of public spaces, creating unease among citizens of the territories and negative reactions, with consequences towards refugees.

The "migrants" theme is an issue that concerns all Europe. Data show that, in recent years, a growing number of asylum seekers and migrants began to turn to the European Union to apply for asylum, travelling across the Mediterranean Sea, or through Turkey and south-eastern Europe. The EU provides fundings for border patrol operations in the Mediterranean. How to manage migrants is a common problem to deal in each country. Our good practice promotes an integration of migrants in local communities of our area. Migrants are organised in "small groups" and their integration is facilitated with shared projects with local stakeholders. With this system, asylum seekers may become tomorrow a rich resource of experience. It takes into account the human capital.

In reaction to the sudden arrival of tens of thousands of refugees in the city of Hamburg (DE) in 2015, the Lord Mayor requested the CityScienceLab (CSL) at HafenCity University to facilitate a public discussion and decision-making process on locations for refugee accommodation in Hamburg neighbourhoods. With highly sensitive socio-political implications, this project demanded a well-designed technological and procedural approach. CSL employed an innovative Human-Computer Interaction tool, CityScope, to facilitate public participation and urban decision-making. A workshop process was also designed to help multiple participants and stakeholders interact effectively. Running from May to July 2016, the FindingPlaces (FP) project enabled about 400 participants to identify  160 locations accepted by Hamburg’s citizens, out of which 44 passed legal confirmation by the authorities. Overall, on a qualitative level, the project facilitated surprisingly constructive and collaborative interaction, raising awareness and a sense of ownership among participants.

The solutions offered by FP are twofold: 1) a methodological solution (workshop process) and 2) a technological solution (CityScope tool). The methodological solution is a participatory workshop concept, designed especially to enable the direct involvement of citizen groups in the decision-making process concerning the allocation of refugee accommodations. As the task of establishing such accommodations (emergency and long-term) used to stir up heated debate and controversy, a detailed interaction format was designed that comprised moderated group discussion and co-creation sessions, proceeding stepwise from the review of basic urban data towards precise locations of residential housing. The technological solutions consist of a novel tool for Human Machine Interaction (HMI): an interactive modelling table, based on the CityScope technology developed by the Changing Places Group of the MIT Media Lab, Boston. CityScopes are able to represent various urban data (e.g. cadastre plans, functional zoning, accessibility information) on large projection tables, which can be augmented by simple building blocks (e.g. Lego bricks) as carriers of design information, in this case, construction of refugee shelters. The visually coded blocks are scanned and digitised by cameras from beneath the table. Thus, the effectiveness and impact of the modelled solution on the cityscape can be computed and projected as a real-time response on the tables.

FP supports sustainable urban living by solving pressing hardships on refugees and cities alike. It ensures quick and liveable accommodation in urban neighbourhoods, reduces social exclusion by locating refugee communities within urban neighbourhoods – with the direct participation of residents and neighbours who have decision-making power in the overall process. The integrative and participative approach of FP places maximum interest on engagement and involvement of local citizens who act as debaters and decision-makers. For the workshop, participants from all city wards of Hamburg were invited to maintain a fair and balanced distribution of accommodation across the city. Thus, acceptance and social sustainability were ensured. FP earned wide public attention and defined a benchmark. In Hamburg, the project has triggered multiple follow-up activities. It is envisioned to adopt the public participation processes as a basis for all public urban development projects in the future. FP followed an unusual comprehensive approach and horizontal integration by bringing together qualitative and quantitative methods of urban development, novel information technology and participatory approaches. In terms of vertical integration, it connected the Lord Mayor´s Office, city administration, universities, local city wards and civil society, which were all involved with dedicated roles and activities.

In the project, more than 400 citizens followed the widely published invitations to nearly 40 workshops, hosted and facilitated by HafenCity University’s CityScienceLab. For each city ward, multiple workshops were carried out. The invitations were publicly announced via official the Hamburg website, newspapers, and social media. Workshops were free and open to everybody to attend. In the workshop sessions, participants were asked to suggest and debate locations potentially suitable for refugee accommodation in their respective city ward. To supply the workshops, rich urban information about local conditions of the plots (quantitative data, legal constraints, emissions, zoning law etc.) were prepared by the CityScienceLab and made available on the interactive CityScope tables. That way a shared and objective basis for discussion was given and a well-informed pre-selection of potential sites for refugee shelters could be made. In following steps, pre-selected sites were discussed and commented in detail and enriched with expertise from municipal authorities and planners. In the final step of the workshops, the participants decided on specific locations to be listed for the city government to execute the construction of refugee accommodations. Several urban authorities were involved in the project, including Hamburg’s Authority for Urban Development, Authority for Refugee Coordination and Authority for Science and Research.

FP has changed the scale and quality of participation projects in Hamburg and Germany. It demonstrated how citizens could quickly find suitable solutions for urgent social and urban problems, in this case the massive accommodation of refugees within the urban community. In numbers, FP has directly involved about 400 Hamburg citizens in workshops, who experienced a straightforward and future-looking form of citizen participation in a socio-politically highly relevant topic. The final success of the project, with 44 locations being found through collaborative work, created a sense of ownership among all participants. Throughout the city, the project has created awareness about the acute issues of appropriate refugee accommodation and a sense of collaboration. It further created a public understanding of the fairness issue in respect to distributing the loads and responsibilities between all city wards (independent from their social and economic status). Supported by large public attention and press coverage, the project has changed the general attitude of Hamburg´s citizens towards refugees – from a perspective of passive hardship to an objective problem-solving attitude. Evidence was given on these results by track research carried out by the CityScienceLab (thesis projects of students, scientific publications, data analysis), by feedback from the public and from the media (local and national newspapers, social media, TV coverage).

FP is relevant and transferable to other European cities. In a narrow sense, the issue of massive refugee influx and their ad hoc accommodation is a challenge shared by many cities across Europe. In this context, the availability of validated and transferable methods and technologies is highly valuable. The methodology with its choreographed sequence of participatory planning and decision-making workshops can be applied in a similar way in other European cities. Similarly, the key tool – the CityScope – is ready for mobile application in other places too (in fact, it has been applied worldwide already, yet to different tasks of urban development tasks than refugee accommodation). The organiser and facilitator team of FP made great efforts to exemplify the process and procedures of FP in a way that it could be easily adapted to other places too: manuals, guidelines and visual description for easy application in workshop settings were created. In face of unstable political conditions, further inflows of refugees are possible in near future. It will be necessary to have quick and effective means to solve urgent challenges such as a rapid finding of appropriate refugee accommodations. FP has delivered a blueprint for quick and successful action. In a more general sense, the practice and technology of FP and CityScope can be applied to a broad range of similar urban problems, especially the identification of appropriate locations for specific uses.