Title of Deliverable: Due date of Deliverable: July 2010 Project coordinator:        Panteion University (UPSPS) Partners:        International Center for Minority Studies and Intercultural Relations (IMIR)         University of Cyprus (UCY)         Universita di Bologna (UNIBO)         ‘Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati (UDJG)         Concorci Institut d’ Infancia I Mon Urba (CIIMU)         “Euro-Balkan” Institute (EU-BAL)         Bilkent University (BILKENT-U) Project no. 216065 Thematic Area: Cultural Interactions and Multiculturalism in European Societies Start date of Project: February 2008 Duration: 3 years Dissemination Level     PU  Public X     PP  Restricted to other programme participants     RE  Restricted to a group specified by the concortium     Co  Confidential WP Coordinator: Institute of Childhood and Urban World (CIIMU), Spain Research Teams Greece: UPSPS Dina Vaiou, Olga Lafazani, Rouli Lykogianni Italy: UNIBO Sandro Mezzadra, Gigi Roggero, Giorgio Grappi Spain: CIIMU Claudia Pedone, Sandra Gil Araujo, Lucía Solavagione Belén Agrela and Paula Castello Starkoff Table of Contents Based on the case studies of Bologna, Athens and Barcleona, the purpose of this research is to analyze the role of urban public spaces in the creation of intercultural and social inclusion/exclusion relations. We focus in the use and appropriation of these spaces from a gender approach that considers specifically the migrant families experiences. Besides, we use the feminist concept of positionality to understand how the social situatedness of migrants conditioning their practices of citizenship (gender, ethnicity, education, immigration status, social class, age and generations, length of stay, and migration experiences). We propose the idea of citizenship as social practice that migrants engage at multiples scales and with multiples public spheres across national boundaries. From this point of view the urban spaces are a privileged place to understand migrant citizenships practices. We consider public spaces as privileged places of interaction and participation, and crucial to the formation of the identification processes and to the construction of citizenship. Public spaces are understood in a broad sense, that include those in the open air and those in premises, public and private, such as squares, streets, parks, commercial areas, cultural, health, entertainment equipments, etc.; in sum, public places of encounter and confrontation in the city. An specific area of study has been chosen considering its diversity in terms of the origin of the population. As people’s daily practices and experiences are very important to evaluate places and taking into account the social diversity and difference, the challenge is to see the different uses of these spaces and the access to the social rights linked at gender, age, social class and origin variables. Therefore, the research will be based on a qualitative methodological perspective from a gender approach. In order to study and research the public spaces, each national team decided on a specific neighbourhood:Bolognina in Bologna, Kypseli in Athens, Poble Sec in Barcelona, which share quite a few common characteristics. They are working-class neighbourhoods where on top of the domestic migrant waves they experienced in the middle of the XX Century, the international migrants are adding new perspectives to the interaction and participation in the borough. Nowadays, the three neighbourhoods have hight percentages of migrants population (Poble Sec, 28.1%, Kypseli, 21%  and Bolognina 17%). In the last decades, the three have experienced a process of revitalization and gentrification, and they also have a very rich associative network. Study of gender, migration and intercultural interactions in urban spaces and/or social movements with particular emphasis on local communities Based on a gender and positionality perspective, the goal of the research is to investigate: a) the migrant’s use of the urban spaces and the changes of the city, b) formal and informal practices in local communities and neighbourhoods in which intercultural interactions takes place, c) migrant’s citizenship practices in their local and transnational lives. Objectives - To undertake research on the intersection between gender, migration and intercultural interactions in urban spaces and/or social movements with particular emphasis on local communities, neighbourhoods and the production of transnational «homes». - To study formal and informal practices of assimilation, integration, and/or marginalization as well as forms of resistance to established power relations in urban spaces and social movements, and assess their impact on gender relations. - To develop an alternative framework for understanding local communities, neighbourhoods and transnational “homes” as material spaces of intercultural interaction with particular emphasis on identifying resistances. - To analyse the (public and private) agents who make up the organization of daily life (e.g. community public social services or health services and immigrants’ associations or “ethnic” businesses) - To explore political and theoretical perspectives through which both conflict and dialogue between natives and migrant groups can be accommodated in local context and explore the possibilities of urban social movements contributing to intercultural relations. - To explore the connections between public/private, universalism/particularism, equality/difference in the discourses and practices aimed at the integration of immigrants: Basic outline The purpose of this research is to analyze the role of urban public spaces in the creation of intercultural and social inclusion/exclusion relations. We focus in the use and appropriation of these spaces from a gender approach that considers specifically the migrant families experiences. Besides, we use the feminist concept of positionality to understand how the social situatedness of migrants conditioning their practices of citizenship (gender, ethnicity, education, immigration status, social class, age and generations, length of stay, and migration experiences). We consider public spaces as privileged places of interaction and participation, and crucial to the formation of the identification processes and to the construction of citizenship. Public spaces are understood in a broad sense, that include those in the open air and those in premises, public and private, such as squares, streets, parks, commercial areas, cultural, health, entertainment equipments, etc.; in sum, public places of encounter and confrontation in the city. An specific area of study has been chosen considering its diversity in terms of the origin of the population. As people’s daily practices and experiences are very important to evaluate places and taking into account the social diversity and difference, the challenge is to see the different uses of these spaces and the access to the social rights linked at gender, age, social class and origin variables. We propose the idea of citizenship as social practice that migrants engage at multiples scales and with multiples public spheres across national boundaries. From this point of view the urban spaces are a privileged place to understand migrant citizenships practices. Place, in this logic, is not regarded as a static, determinate and bounded ‘object’ but as temporary and open, as the varying outcome of the dynamics between specific relations and processes, conceptualizations, demands and claims by the individuals and groups that inhabit it as subjects of divergent experiences and needs. Research methodology The research was based on a qualitative methodological perspective from a gender approach. Before the fieldwork, partners of WP7 agreed the methodological framework; selected a neighbourhood as case study in which field work would be conducted and developed an ‘interview guides’ (see Appendix 1). Fieldwork methods have involved: mapping of the neighborhood (uses, activities etc.), participant  observation (spaces of leisure and aggregation organized and attended by migrant women and men, markets and stores, urban parks, coffee shops, “ethnic” food stores, hairdressers and beauty shops), interviews with locals, users and planners. - Public spaces as privileged places of conflict, encounter, interaction, participation, political action, and intercultural relations. - Public spaces as crucial for the identifications processes, in the elaboration of senses of place and belonging, and in the construction of citizenship. - Migrants as residents of the place allows us to analyzed their role as creators of scale without recourse to preconceived ideas about weather their relations with the place are determined by nationality or ethnicity (Glick Schiller, 2008). - Gender as a transversal variable crucial in the unequal access and use of urban public spaces. - Positionality as power relations  “…in the sense that uneven power is associated with the placement of individuals in social, cultural, and material space, and within nation-state and the global economy” (Leitner and Ehrkamp, 2006, p. 1616) . - Migrations are triggers for intercultural relationships. - Importance of representations of gender and immigration in the design, management and assessment of the urban “integration” and “participation” policies and programmes. Basic research questions  Do recent transformations in European cities generate processes of social exclusion for unfavorably evaluated groups (women, migrants) in urban public spaces?  Which role for the migrant community in the transformation of the urban spaces and its borders?  How the public spaces – that is, the spaces of creation of intercultural relations – put in question the traditional ideas and concepts of neighbourhood and community, related to the local and national framework?  In which terms the use of public space by migrants put in question the gender, class, cultural, symbolic borders within the urban spaces?  Are there any processes discernible leading to ghettization of certain public spaces? About use public spaces What are some of the urban population’s daily practices for the use and appropriation of public spaces?  What roles do gender and origin play as structuring and differentiating variables in the use of public spaces?  Are public spaces prominent in the creation and development of intercultural relations? What elements favour social inclusion, including in terms of gender, in urban public spaces?  What policies favour social inclusion, including in terms of gender, in urban public spaces? Which other spaces are used by migrants as places of social inclusion, or citizenship practices (i.e. union)?  What are the implications of the presence in public spaces of significant numbers of undocumented immigrants for the idea and practice of dynamic citizenship? Relationship between labor and public spaces  Which role for the work in the use of the public space, first of all on a gender standpoint?  What relation between public space and workplace?  What relation between the workplace, the use of public space and the change in the migrant family (i.e. the case of domestic workers)? About social movements  In the context of such processes, what are some of the strategies undertaken by local governments in relation to public spaces?  What roles do NGOs and immigrant associations play in the use of public spaces? Among the diverse themes addressed within the study of urban public spaces, we focus most specifically upon the issue of public space. This focus requires the definition of the concept. Within academic literature there are many definitions of public space, more complementary than mutually exclusive, from which we borrow requisites and attributes, without being exhaustive in our selection. One of the main characteristics associated with public space is that of being an open space, tolerant in the sense of allowing a great variety of uses and users (Walzer, 1986), spaces for which access and enjoyment are limited by the logics of the market or of power. At the same time public spaces include a participatory and even festive dimension, when groups of citizens, or even local or other administrations use it as a space for gathering and celebration, as it is the case with large-scale festivities, street markets, etc.(Francis, 1989). Other authors emphasize the socially cohesive dimension of public spaces, integrating and democratic, also linked to political expression in events such as protests and rallies, etc. (López de Lucio, 2000). This positive dimension is also associated with attributes such as openness to otherness and the potential for public spaces to be inclusive and accessible (Delgado, 1999). Finally we should also mention attributes which favor communication, encounters, and exchange between people with different characteristics (Borja and Muxí, 2001). This aspect is of interest in our research, in the sense of considering public space as privileged in the manifestation and development of intercultural relations between people of diverse origins. If public space is seen as open to all people who live in or visit a city, aspects such as governance, cultural identity, and citizenship (Low, 2001) are reinforced. A gender focus has contributed notably to the definition of public space and has even reinterpreted them. Fundamentally, feminist geographies have emphasized the role public spaces play in the everyday life of cities, particularly stressing women’s perceptions, uses, and specific necessities within them (Coutras, 1996; McDowell, 1999). We need to recognize that women establish a very close relationship with the public spaces of their residential and work environments given that the combination of domestic and labor responsibilities make women not only users of these spaces but also experts in their daily urban environment (García Ballesteros, 1989, Coutras, 1996, Justo, 2000). Numerous research projects based upon different cases have started with such multisided and complex conceptualizations of public space (Monnet, 2002; Ortiz, 2003; 2004; Pedone, 2004; Guzmán, 2007; Aramburu Otazu, 2008). These works, among others, focus on different aspects but share the desire to situate public space at the center of their analyses. They also frame public space as an articulating element for concern over variables such as gender or migration processes. The presence or perhaps co-existence of people with distinct identities (according to origin, sex, age, sexual orientation, etc.) in shared public spaces has also been the object of analysis. Of particular focus have been processes of exclusion within public spaces that can impact on certain collectivities or persons. For example, the temporal co-existence of people of different origins makes way for a great diversity of situations that can go from a “polite disregard” (Delgado, 2007) to an open conflict. Even in studies which demonstrate a high ethnic concentration in public spaces, it has been observed that this does not necessarily generate a negative situation, but rather it can create a situation of peaceful if distant co-existence (Torres, 2004). In this sense the author highlights the need to understand and explain the diverse forms of managing the proximity-distance axis which characterizes multicultural public spaces and the dynamics they generate (Torres, 2004, p.10). Finally, in the case of our research, it is important to keep in mind the connections between variables such as gender and migration with a transnational perspective. Following Liliana Suárez (2007), we attribute the adjective transnational to “economic, political, and socio-cultural processes and practices that are linked to and configured by the logics of more than one nation-state, and which are characterized by the constant crossing of borders” (Suárez, 2007:1). This author warns us about the uses and misuses associated with this concept, adding a critical perspective which we consider to be of great use for the future development of our research. For example, analyses of social networks undertaken from the transnational perspective and which have also been attentive to gender have allowed family dynamics to emerge as fertile terrain for the production of knowledge about migratory movements. Such analyses have permitted researchers to challenge the representation of international migration as a fundamentally masculine decision (Pedone, 2004). The use of the concept of transnationalism allows for a much richer and more complex approximation of the reality of intercultural relationships in public spaces. From the transnational perspective, interest in public spaces crosses borders and takes into account the macro-social consequences that arise from their use (Moraes, 2006). When it comes to analyzing migrants’ participation in public spaces we should consider some of Saskia Sassen’s theoretical suggestions (2003), referring to the practices that update the citizenship as constant social inventions that have an equivalent in the law. The author relates this de facto citizenship with the presence but also with actions in the public domain which provide subjects, who are not usually taken into account in the public sphere, with recognition and legitimacy. The term presence refers to the condition of political agents of subjects who are subordinate or stripped of power. So, immigrants without documents are people whose unauthorized presence generates rights. On the opposite side Sassen places women: in the case of immigrant women their role as sustainers of survival and family welfare often functions as a transforming element that drives their participation in the public space. The home, the community, the neighbourhood and the school thus become spaces where women are key actors. When they are lived or experienced as non political spheres those spaces are turned into “microenvironments with a global scope” (Vega Solís and Gil Araujo 2003). The city is turned into a space where non-formal political subjects construct a political scene that allows a wide range of interventions (neighbourhood assemblies, self managed spaces, struggles for immigrants’ rights, protests over cutbacks in public services), and encourages the formation of new subjectivities and territories for experiments, aside from the formal political system. The potential of the exercise of citizenship as the “right to the city” and the mutual recognition of subjects connected in many cross border circuits involve assuming the capacity for action which is exercised against the constraints of national and economic citizenship. According to Sassen’s analysis, global citizenship today occupies a special place in cities and in the interconnection of transnational networks and circuits. Perhaps we should start to pay attention to the meaning and value assigned by the migrant population to local belonging, their ways of appropriating the spaces where they live and their imaginaries around the idea of citizenship (Leitner and Ehrkamp 2006). Methodology The study of the everyday use of public spaces and its meanings from a gender perspective requires a primarily qualitative methodology. Practically speaking, most gender-sensitive studies on the uses and appropriations of urban public spaces employ qualitative methodologies because these allow researchers to explore the processes that produce certain phenomena and promote an awareness of socio-spatial experience. On the other hand, it is known that feminist thought is constructed from distinct methods and methodologies, a diversity united by the common thread of its conscientious critique of the social context and of the consequences brought by the contexts in which research occurs (Madge et al., 1997). For feminists, knowledge is experiential and interpretive, and the appropriate methodology is that which recognizes the social relationships of research and which has emancipatory objectives for all involved. Qualitative methods offer perhaps the most direct route toward producing such situated knowledge. In any case, discourses proposing ‘feminist methods of investigation’ have moved beyond rejecting quantitative methods for their connection with positivism and toward developing new strategies which recognize the complementarities of techniques and, over all, insist more upon feminist objectives than upon the utilization of certain methods (Baylina, 1997; Prats, 1998). Feminist researchers start from the premise that different women have different experiences that need to be compiled; that the space of research is never neutral but rather it is a certain changing political, social, economic, and cultural context; and that what we decide to research, discover, or value is determined by the positioning of our identity (age, religion, gender, ethnicity, cultural origin, sexual orientation, and location in space and time, among others). At the same time, in the research process, the researchers assume complex and dynamic social relations which raise many ethical dilemmas to be resolved. Finally, research results are interpreted taking into account the researcher’s context, understood as her or his system of values, behaviors, attitudes, and sentiments, and it is written up in conscious consideration of the intended audience (in this sense, co-authorship with an informant or at least the literal reproduction of their words strengthen the final product). Within this framework, qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews, narrative analysis, informative interviews, participant observation, discussion groups, life histories, or the use of visual materials (mental maps, drawings, photographs, film, etc.) are the most appropriate for investigating the use of public spaces by both locals and new residents, in the widest possible frame of practice and daily experience and with attention to the importance gender has for behavior. Visual methods are increasingly utilized by feminist researchers of all analytical themes, including that of migration. Keeping in mind the importance of the visual in contemporary western societies, their use is particularly interesting. Those researchers who have done so think that visual images are not innocent but constructed via practice, technology, and diverse knowledge, not as ‘natural’, and they recommend that potential users assume a critical stance, one which considers how the meanings of images are linked to their production, to the image itself, and to the intended audience (Rose, 2001). In this sense, images have been used in distinct works dealing with the use of public spaces by women and children. (Fenster 2004; Young and Barret 2001). It is also necessary to highlight that new perspectives require new analytical methods and approaches that include the scope, heterogeneity, and scale of the social transformations associated with processes recently incorporated into migrations such as transnationalism (Moraes, 2006). Case StudiesIn order to study and research the public spaces in Bologna, Athens and Barcelona each national team decided on a specific neighbourhood. The three chosen cases –Bolognina in Bologna, Kypseli in Athens, Poble Sec in Barcelona- share quite a few common characteristics:   They are working-class neighbourhoods where on top of the domestic migrant waves they experienced in the middle of the XX century, the international migrants are adding new perspectives to the interaction and participation in the borough. At the end of 1990s the three neighbourhoods experienced the arrival, on one hand of local people moving to the area because of the reasonable price of properties, and on the other, the arrival of international migrants (attracted to these areas for the same reasons). Although the nationalities of the migrant communities do not coincide in any of the three cities, the percentages of migrants in each neighbourhood are not too far apart (Poble Sec, 28.1%, Kypseli, 21%  and Bolognina 17%). The three neighbourhoods have experienced a process of revitalization and gentrification, Kypseli and Poble Sec a low-cost gentrification through the new arrivals, and Bolognina a higher class one through the intervention of state and private enterprises. Bolognina, Kypseli and Poble Sec have a very rich associative network. A central and large neighborhood -it is part of the administrative area of Navile- Bolognina is a popular part of the city and a traditional meeting point. Since the 1990s it has been the most populous migrant zone in Bologna. The largest groups come from China, Morocco, and  Philippines, followed by a wide variety of other sending countries: Bangladesh, Albania, Ukraine, Moldova, Pakistan, Eritrea, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Serbia, Egypt, Peru, and many others. The so called “irregular” and “clandestine” migrants are excluded from the official statistics: nevertheless they have a structural presence in the social, productive, and economic fabric, as well as in the everyday life of the urban spaces. Historically Bolognina has been a working-class neighbourhood, with the presence, until the 1980s of many industries. With the building of the new city house, new residential lots and the project of a new station the neighbourhood is now facing a fast transformation towards gentrification, due to his strategic position close to the city centre, the train station and important national and local roads. It is only from the beginning of the 1980s that the presence of migrants becomes relevant in the city of Bologna, following the Italian national trend. It suffice to mention that still in 1992 the average migrants population of Bologna was not above 1,4% of the total population, and their presence almost doubled from 2002 to 2008. Total population: Bologna: 374,944 Navile: 64,593 Bolognina: 32,751 Migrant population: Bologna: 39,480 Navile: 8,969 Bolognina: 5,594 Percentage of migrants in the total population: Bologna: 10,5% Navile: 13.9% Bolognina: 17% We can thus notice that while Bolognina counts for the 8,7% of the total population of the city, more than the 14% of the total migrants population leaves in the neighbourhood. Regarding the dynamic dimension of the neighbourhood, their study led them to foresee a process of “gentrification”: entire areas now considered as periphery, but very close to the City centre, are becoming an administrative centre and will include housing, new commercial activities, transport hubs, etc. Methodologically, that means that they should focus approach he dynamic processes that involve migrant communities living in the area, rather than suggest a stable relation among them and the neighbourhood. Regarding the first outcomes of the research, one of the main ideas derives from the fact that Bolognina is neither a sort of “ghetto” nor an ethnic enclave. Rather, it has become an urban hub, continuously transformed by the mobility: the transnational mobility and the mobility within the city. This aspect has led them to reflect on a methodological question: since they’re based on the constant mobility, the ethnography has to become mobile too. Consequently, they propose a multi-sited ethnography also within the urban spaces which would imply following the movement of the people. In accordance whit this, they have come to the conclusion that there are at least  two kinds of networks: 1) A network based on the community: quite stable, producing in the new spaces a pre-existing identity, and multiplying the borders within the city, 2) A network as an outcome of new forms of life and sociality, questioning the borders both of the city and its internal communities. The movements of the migrants in the urban spaces, are also a movement among these two kinds of network. Kypseli, one of the oldest neighbourhoods in the municipality of “new” Athens. The influx of refugees from Asia Minor in 1922, along with internal migration from other parts of the country contribute to more intense urbanization of the area, initially with single family houses, mainly for well-off households. The Municipal Market “Agora” operated as a local market until the 1990s. Since 2006, following the mobilization of local citizen groups, it functions as a self-organized neighbourhood center, with cultural activities, many of which involve migrants. The apartment blocks, with multiple types and sizes of apartments, attract many internal migrants. Increasing population densities coincide with a period of growth and rising standards of living, in which Kypseli becomes famous as a center for night life in the whole city. Intensive reconstruction continues through the 1970s but in the 1980s there was a move away from Kypseli of younger and better-off households towards the developing suburbs in the north-east and the south-east of the metropolitan area. Recent migrants initially settled in the basement and ground floor flats of apartment buildings. Professional offices (lawyers, engineers, etc) gradually occupied the middle floors, while old residents, particularly older in age, remained in the better and more spacious flats of the upper floors. There are of course many particularities in this complex pattern of building occupancy, named “vertical segregation” (Maloutas, Karadimitriou 2001). The 1990s is a new turning point for Kypseli, which seems to gain populations, following a former downward tendency of decrease both of population and of the size of household. Census data indicate a consolidation of population, as the outflow of old residents is counterbalanced by the settlement of usually larger migrant households, as well as by a small but identifiable “return” of local youth. Kypseli’s population        47.437 inhabitants Migrant population:        21% Albanian:                                49,2% Poles                                           8,5% Bulgarian                                  4,5% Romanians & Ukrainians                             3,5% Smaller percentages are present from Moldova, Russia, Georgia, Yugoslavia, Armenia, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, South Africa, Egypt, Philippines, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria and many other countries. All these constitute the mosaic of residents in Kypseli, the most multi-ethnic neighbourhood of Athens that recent migrants have contributed not only to re-insert this old and ageing housing stock to the market, but also to upgrade it through personal labour and mutual assistance. The Greek team has conducted the fieldwork case study in the neighbourhood of Kypseli, Athens. They have concentrated in two interrelated spaces: the central square and the old Market place (henceforth ‘Agora’). Kypseli offers examples of multiple (informal) processes and everyday practices of “living together” among locals and migrants. Phenomena of racism or resentment are not absent from the scene, but it is undeniable that migrants find ways to settle and form their own familiar places and routines. The research is based mainly on qualitative interviews, as well as on participant observation in the two central study locations, where there is frequent contact between the migrant and autochthonous populations. The urban spaces in which the fieldwork is carried out are:  1) The square of Kypseli. This is a crowded public space where migrant and local people meet and interconnect. The main questions for the systematic observation were about the people that use the square (gender, ethnicity, age,), why they are there (spending their free time, stop for a break, meet their friends, take their children to play, have a coffee), how often they go, what kind of relations and interconnections are built in this public space, how the people in the square “change” depending on the hour and day of the week in different hours and different days of the week. 2) The ‘Agora’. It used to be a commercial centre and now it functions as a cultural and social centre run by grassroots organizations. Among other activities there is an evening school where volunteer teachers give free Greek language lessons to migrants who live in the neighbourhood. As it is a space where migrant people meet other migrants and locals, the team has decided to focus on the school of Agora, collaborating with the teachers.  They use these lessons to discuss with the students the issues of space, place, neighbourhood, gender and every day life. They are using these classes, together with individual interviews, to talk about subjects such as: who the immigrants residing in the neighbourhood and in the city are, their daily life, their migration processes and trajectories, and the different places where they have lived. They have also asked them to write texts about their every day life in the city and to draw their own maps - mental maps of the city. Poble Sec is a borough in the Sants-Montjuïc district –the largest of the ten districts of Barcelona. It is a working class neighbourhood which in the early 20th century, especially from 1911 to 1930, was populated by people arriving in Barcelona from Aragón, Valencia, Murcia and Galicia to work in the textile factories that had opened there and in the surroundings, or on the building of the Barcelona underground railway (inaugurated in 1924), or the pavilions of the Universal Exhibition –held in 1929– on Montjuïc hill. Between the 1950s and 1970s another flow of migrants from different regions of Spain also settled as best they could in Poble Sec. The lack of planning is a significant element for understanding the evolution of a borough, ignored by the council at the time, where it was the people who organized themselves in their everyday spaces and built indispensable infrastructures such as the sewers or the electric network, thus giving rise to the phenomenon known as “shanty town”. In the 1980s, Poble Sec had lived through an ageing process and the young people had gradually left the borough for better equipped sectors of the city. At the end of the 90s, the residents of the borough –Catalan, Aragones, Andalusian, Castilian...– were stupefied to see the gradual but steady influx, not only of young people from other boroughs of Barcelona, drawn by the reasonable rents, but also of immigrants from different parts of the world. Those international migrants (Pakistani, Moroccan, Philippine, Latin American...) settled in Poble Sec in what was to be the first stage of their migratory process. Since 2002 the population has risen from 35,130 inhabitants to 40,650, of whom 11,588 are foreign residents, 28.1% In the 1980s and 1990s, Poble Sec underwent a process of ageing of the population and of abandonment of trading activities. Since 2000, immigrant population of different origins began to arrive, mainly Dominicans, Pakistanis and Filipino, and revived trading activity. The local government initiative to make Blai St. pedestrian encouraged trade in the shape of businesses managed by the migrant population. The most visible section of the population in terms of the use of public space is the Latin American community, especially the Dominican one. Migrant population in Poble Sec (January 2010) 11.360 (28,1% of total population) Main Nationalities (January 2010) Pakistan                       1.305 Philippines                  988 Morocco                  940 Italy                                739 Dominican Republic          645 Ecuador                          642 The Spanish team focused mainly on two spaces: a) Blai St., a very busy pedestrian and commercial thoroughfare with small shops, a large proportion of which is staffed by immigrants, and b) Surtidor Square, where the local Civic Centre provides social and cultural services for migrants and locals alike (including Catalan language lessons) and where the Health Centre serves every member of the community. These two spaces – Blai St. and Surtidor Square- make an excellent field for analyzing the use of public space by the newcomers and the local population (already quite mixed between native Catalans and Spanish migrants arrived since the 1960s). The local government initiative to make Blai St. pedestrian encouraged trade in the shape of businesses managed by the migrant population. The use of the studied public spaces is not free from problems and, in the words of the neighbours, there are coexistence problems. According to the first outcomes of the research, the conflict in the use of the most busiest public spaces is determined by factors such as social class, xenophobic and racist feelings, age and gender. The fieldwork in Poble Sec began in January 2009 and has continued until January 2010. Before starting the in-depth interviews, the research team did a series of floating and participant observations and worked in the neighbourhood to establish a trustworthy network of contacts to talk to. The changing nature of those global migrant movements, alongside with specific local development patterns in Southern European countries has led many researchers to talk of a “Southern European” or “Mediterranean model” of migration (among many King et al 2000; Macioti, Pugliese 1991; Bettio et al 2006; Tastsoglou, Hadjiconstanti 2003). Movements had started earlier (in Italy already in the 1970s, in Greece and Spain in the mid-1980s), but they became more intense, at times massive, in the 1990s, involving people not only from Third World countries but also from Eastern Europe. Following the “fall of the Berlin Wall”, the latter were not only “free to flee” from their countries, but free to go and come back. And many took this opportunity in order to cope with the harsh realities of passage to a neoliberal market regime. Differences among groups of migrants, countries and particular localities are significant, while the complex geographies of movement/settlement cannot certainly be understood in a simple North-South scheme. There are, however, some features which differentiate post-1989 migration flows from earlier ones towards the North, justifying perhaps references to an emerging “model”. Among these features we identify the following, which are relevant to our research: high chances to find a job in a large “informal economy”, involving many areas of economic activity, and most prominently personal services, construction, tourism and agriculture a growing demand for female labour, particularly in caring and entertainment and to a lesser degree in tourism migrant settlement predominantly in urban areas. International Migration is a structural element of every day life which is definitely transforming the cities all around the world (Sassen 1991). Migratory movements reveal different aspects of urban space, since, per force, they link different kind of spaces, places and processes. In this sense they support what D. Massey (1994) calls “a progressive sense of place”, that is to say a conception of place as a particular moment in intersecting social relations, “nets of which have over time been constructed, laid down, interacted with one another, decayed and renewed. Some of these relations will be, as it were, contained within the place; others will stretch beyond it, tying any particular locality into wider relations and processes in which other places are implicated too” (p. 120). We approach the neighbourhood as an important socio-spatial scale among many and not as a bounded space. The economic forces which determine it extend beyond its boundaries and beyond the boundaries of the city in which it is located; residents bring with them their origins in remote and multiple places; the products sold in local shops have been produced in a global economy. These and other aspects of “the neighbourhood” emerge also from our case studies in central and peripheral neighbourhoods of our cities, where we identify global-local encounters and (re)negotiations of multiple identities of place. The practices of migrant women and men reveal changing urban landscapes, which are invested with different gendered meanings and experiences (see also Dyck, McLaren 2004) and point to informal mechanisms of integration “from below” along with, and sometimes despite of, institutional practices “from above”. Such mechanisms may be found in the workings of the housing market, in the uses of public spaces, in the renewed neighbourly relations, in the formation of dense support networks, in the ever more prominent presence of migrant businesses and services – all of which involve increasing numbers of locals as well. On one hand, the migrants’ presence have revitalized, rejuvenated and gave a new life to the neighborhood. On the other, the migration problematizes the traditional concept of neighborhood and local space. In cities which have succeeded in reinventing themselves over and over again such as Barcelona, Athens and Bologna neighbourhoods like Poble Sec, Kypseli and Bolognina have discovered in the past decade the value of commercial hospitality and the importance of “ethnic” shops, bars and restaurants as agents for revitalizing an area which was in serious decline. Like in other city districts, migrants have come to occupy an important role in the production of new forms of neighbourhood living. In Poble Sec and Kypseli case studies we can differentiate those urban processes that Saskia Sassen calls a low-cost equivalent of gentrification… Small investments become neighbourhood upgrading because of the residential concentration of immigrants. The interviews with immigrants residing in Poble Sec since the late 1990s provide evidence of the important transformation in the composition of the neighbourhood’s population. These changes refer to the increase in the number of different kinds of shops (greengrocer’s, butcher’s, hairdresser’s, locutorios, bars) managed by immigrants, but they also refer to the growing presence of neighbours of immigrant origin since the beginnings of the 21st century, which resulted first from the arrival of Dominicans, followed by Ecuadorians and other Latin Americans, and which has then been augmenting and diversifying since 2003, with the arrival of immigrants from Pakistan and China. Many of these immigrants, especially the Dominicans, have moved to Poble Sec from other areas of Barcelona because the cost of renting or buying a property was more affordable for them. However, the urbanistic and commercial operation of reconfiguring the neighbourhood into a multicultural and leisure territory has skyrocketed real estate prices, and for some years now, families of immigrant origin who want to have a house of their own have been forced to move to other areas in the suburbs of Barcelona, such as Hospitalet de Llobregat, which came up in different interviews with Dominicans and Pakistanis. It is interesting to remember that Hospitalet is a neighbourhood in the outskirts of Barcelona known for its high concentration of Castilian-speaking, working-class population, coming from other points of Spain. In 2005 the Poble Sec Traders Association was formed, bringing together native and migrant populations around the improvement of the neighbourhood and the maintenance of trading activity. One important line of work of the Association is “selling” Poble Sec as a place to enjoy leisure, culture and commerce. In this case the idea of commercial hospitality goes hand in hand with the idea of regeneration and rebranding of the neighbourhood as a pleasure zone thriving with new “ethnic” restaurants and bars staffed by migrants. In the past five years eating and drinking spaces have proliferated, and most of them are managed or staffed by migrant people. But, according to Nadja Monet (2002), the “ethnic” touch of certain bars or restaurants –which can be seen either in their decoration or in the exhibition of national products, or in the music they play, etc.- favours the concentration of certain people in them but at the same time makes others go away. This is quite important for coexistence since in some places there is a tendency to attract an exclusive clientele on a national belonging base and this appropriation of a public place by a specific group weighs on the choice of other potential clients. In Kypseli, the fieldwork findings show three aspects which relate the arrival of the migrant population with the urban transformations: revitalisation of the housing market, intensive use of public transport and restructuring of commercial activity. In any case, it is certain that migrant shops mark the streets and re-define the image of the urban tissue. At the same time they themselves find points of reference and places to frequent, like kiosks on the square, a cafe, a barbeque stand which are meeting points for male migrants. On the other hand, women congregate mainly in the square, particularly mothers of small children, since playgrounds and open spaces are rare in the area, while Fokionos Negri, still a (pedestrianised) linear green space, is lined by rather upmarket cafes and restaurants targeting a rather “local” clientele. In the square, a lively space at all times, migrants and locals meet and familiarize with each other and at times establish neighbourly contacts. Migrant presence in Kypseli is very visible in public spaces and in land use transformations. As old residents mention “we became aware of them mostly in the streets”. However, there are by now many shops and small businesses which are either operated by migrants or belong to migrants – observation alone cannot always testify to one or the other. Some special businesses/services are directed to migrants only, most prominently call-centres for communication with the countries of origin and money transfer offices which facilitate sending remittances. In the observation sessions we identified also mini-markets, bakeries, hairdressing salons, barbers, video clubs, internet cafes, fast-food stands, ethnic food stores and restaurants – all of which seem to fill a gap in the market, exceeding the neighbourhood and the specific ethnic communities. These shops attract customers through specialised offer, long opening hours, quality service and affordable prices. They also play a stabilising role in the neighbourhood: they make the migrants’ presence more visible, promote different selling/buying habits and usually function as points of reference for various groups and as contact places between migrants and locals. At the same time they are important employment and income generators. In this process migrant women are key actors, both as consumers and as workers, in “family businesses” or in shops of their own. The attitudes of locals remain ambiguous. Some talk about criminality, drugs, mafias and prostitution, about women afraid to move around after dark, about old residents who have left; they use hard, phobic language: “we do not have anything to do with them”, “the issue is not how many they are, but how we can get rid of them”, “foreigners are a source of evil”, “we have become Tirana square”. Others, however, admit that “the shops work”, “whatever time I call her [the Albanian neighbour] she comes to buy something for me, to do help do something…”, “they respect neighbours”, “they have revitalised the neighbourhood”, “we are also (internal) migrants”. However, in the case of Bolognina there is a proper gentrification process of high standing promoted by the City Council and private enterprises. The Navile district where Bolognina belongs is involved in recent years in many public projects of different nature: from housing to sport venues, transports, green areas, and cultural institutions as libraries. Among those projects, three (all based in Bolognina) are particularly relevant for the future of neighbourhood, two public and one private. 1) The new city hall. Ultimated at the end of 2008, the project involves a complex of modern buildings were the offices of the Bologna city hall moved in July, 2008. The old city hall building, in the centre of the city, will remain as set of the representative bodies, but the majority of administrative offices are now in these new buildings, moving in the area many administrative activities and offices. Together with these offices, a market, a pharmacy, restaurants and bars are part of the complex. It is worth to mention that these new buildings are turning part of the formerly abandoned area of the vegetable market into a very densely active area. 2) The new national railway station. A public project for a new station is ongoing, and the whole are is under construction, affecting the living condition of the southern area of Bolognina (vibrations, noise, static problems for the buildings). Although at the present these construction are affecting the neighborhood in a negative way, it is easy to foresaw that once the new station will be ultimated it will represent a value for the entire area, connecting it directly wit the fast national railways and with the present of a modern and internationally recognized project signed by the architect. The whole area surrounding the station, now relatively degraded, will be valorized by this project. 3) The “Trilogia del Navile” private housing project. The third project we present in totally private, and include the construction of luxury housing in the eastern side of the former vegetable market area. Together with the new City Hall and the new train station, it will fill the whole area changing its social composition and urban dynamics. The project involves three different areas with new buildings and parks, together with luxury housing, it will comprises offices and green areas. For those reasons, the project is presented as a private project useful for the whole community. Is easy to foresee that the rising prices of housing and the surrounding commercial activities will affect negatively part of the population now leaving around the area. In the interviews the people design a new idea of the neighbourhood: it became an urban hub, continuously transformed by the mobility – the transnational mobility, and the mobility within the city. The migrants live and transit in the Bolognina spaces, also when they have a house and work elsewhere. They meet on the squares, in the parks, or to the barber shops regardless of their place of residence or work. The local is immediately changed by the transnational practices, habits, and mobility. In the context of the economic crisis, many migrants have to move, sometimes in different neighbourhoods. This is the case of a man from Morocco: “With the economic crisis I loose my job, but I don’t want to come back in Morocco. Maybe it’s better to move towards North to find another job; but I know some friends in Turin or in other Northern cities, and they say that the situation is hard there. So I moved to a neighbourhood in the periphery of Bologna, but everyday I came in the centre to meet my friends and other people.” All in all, regardless of the zone of the house, from the interviews we find the emergence of a desire of the city among migrants. That is to say, the mobility is not only from a country to another country, but towards a new world identified in most cases with the city. In many cases they came from other urban spaces; sometimes they came from the countryside, and they are looking for the cities. Altogether, a lot of migrants want to live in the urban spaces; and living in the urban spaces, they transform them. Therefore, the question of the crisis is central to understand the recent transformation of the city and the ways in which the migrants live the public spaces. For example, it is evident in the problems to find a house: “If you ask for a public house, the first place is always for the Italian people, also if we have children,” says a woman from Sri Lanka. The new urban transformations geographies and maps (Antonelli and Scandurra 2008) are continuously changed by these combinations – and conflicts – of movements. The intense presence of migrants in urban spaces and their complex everyday tactics and strategies to “settle” in a new and unknown place, in the urban neighbourhoods of our research, raise a number of questions to do with participation and belonging. Such questions point to the need to rethink citizenship and its exclusive connection to the national scale. The urban spaces are places of translation, that is to say, of creation of new transnational languages and forms of interaction, as well as conflicts (Sakai and Salomon, 2006; Mezzadra, 2008). In this sense, the articulation of the following variables: gender, age, nationality, social class, family situation, legal status, working conditions and religious practice (only to mention those that come up more frequently) seems to condition the uses given to the public space. This perspective allows us to add complexity to the simplistic dichotomy autochthonous/immigrants and to show the differentiation, hierarchy and inequality regarding the access to public spaces within each of these to big groups, often conceived as homogenous realities. Our fieldwork results in the three chosen neighbourhoods allow us to analyze the uses of the public space from different categories: coexistence, gender and age variables, nationality, religious practices. Conflicts around the public space exceed the immigration question and already existed before present immigrants arrived. However, with the increase of the presence of immigrants in the cities, urban conflicts have come to be considered as problems caused by immigration. In this context, the term coexistence has become a keyword when discussing the matters of immigration and the use of public space. Therefore, it is dangerously likely for coexistence problems to be reduced to the relations between the autochthonous and the immigrant population or between different collectives of immigrants, thus naturalizing their equivalence, as if they were synonyms. For this reason, it is necessary to be aware of the epistemological and political implications of using certain terms and of approaching the coexistence issue from an integral perspective in order not to reduce this matter to the “intercultural conflict” (Aramburu Otazu, 2009). That is why we find it is important to bring up here some considerations on this concept. For Marc Abèlés (2008, 111), the universe of coexistence belongs to a political tradition which is centred in the synchronic harmony of beings who move inside the reassuring universe of the city or who, at least, orient their actions having that horizon in mind, even when they are torn apart by permanent conflicts. In general, security is thought from the optics of coexistence. The State is hence accused for its incapacity to guarantee the harmonic cohabitation between the different population groups that live in the urban peripheries. Tensions confronting “autochthonous” with “immigrants” are brought to light, encouraging a radicalization of discourses that demand a stronger repression of real or supposed prejudices in favour of the civic order. In the present context, considering the growing precariousness and incertitude regarding the future and the incapacity of the State to guarantee the security in this direction, it is more pertinent to speak of survival than of coexistence. In the testimonies of our interviewees in the Barcelona case study, the “cultural” matter and the difficulties to understand and communicate with those defined as different are emphasized when talking about conflicts referred to as “coexistence problems”. The weight of conflict thus fall mainly on the extra-communitarian immigrant population, though not in the same degree on all nationalities present in the neighbourhoods. Nevertheless, our fieldwork has revealed a competition and differentiation in the use of the main public spaces of the neighbourhood which are determined by other factors. The category of nationality enables the exploration of who is conceived as immigrant, whether this is a question of geographic movements (interstate or international) or whether the condition of being an immigrant is connected to coming from certain countries and of lacking public renown  Nobody speaks of extra-communitarian football players as immigrants, regardless of what country they come from. In stead, they are referred to as foreign players. It does not seem likely either that someone may consider the Peruvian writer Vargas Llosa as an immigrant (especially not himself). . On the other hand, the self-defined autochthonous population sees itself as an homogenous collective, with a “common national culture” that makes them different from the immigrant population, also conceived as an homogenous group: “I was born here in the neighbourhood. Before we used to all know each other; now, we know nobody. Many people have left the neighbourhood and migrants have come. The fact is that they don’t have the same customs, they practice other things, they don’t want to adapt themselves, we have to adapt to them. The customs are totally different and the contrast is very strong: the Caribbean and Pakistan, there is no medium” (Informal conversation with autochthonous neighbours on Blai St. Participant observation February 3rd, 2009, 1.30 pm). Based on our fieldwork, as regards the forms of resolution of the conflicts understood as coexistence problems, two stances can be identified: One that supports the intervention of the public administration in the management of conflicts. This position is based on the idea that conflicts derived from “intercultural encounter” both in public and private spaces are a field for the intervention of the Ayuntamiento, which they blame for having caused the situation “that the neighbourhood has reached”. It is a stance that is present in many elderly neighbours and in the Ayuntamiento itself, which has developed plans to make coexistence easier. In other words, from this perspective, social cohesion is something that can be activated from the top downwards through the implementation of proper policies. Another stance insists rather on the management of conflicts by the neighbours themselves through their everyday practices on the streets, in the buildings where they live, in the different kinds of associations. The civilizing pedagogy between old and new neighbours plays a crucial part here. Since the middle of the 1980s, migrants have become more visible in the public spaces of many south european cities, this observation needs to be qualified by gender, since women make more intensive use of urban public spaces than men. In Kypseli for instance, neighbourhood squares seem to have acquired new life through women’s routines and practices, mainly in their open and free ‘core’ area: they are meeting places for women from the same place of origin; play areas for their children; places where, as part of their caring job, they escort local elderly people they look after. In their search to make ends meet with their meagre incomes, it is women rather than men who look for affordable shops, accessible public services, safe places for play and socialising – for themselves and their families. Intensive use of public spaces and facilities at different times of the day and for deferent purposes re-introduces these places in to the urban fabric and to neighbourhood life and draws back the locals as well, particularly children and youth. These places are the sites of face-to-face contact and everyday intermingling and, sometimes, confrontation with locals, as well as with other immigrants. Informal social integration takes place through casual yet repeated contact, over a period of time. It often leads to less casual relations, even to the formation of friendships and networks “I met her (her compatriot friend) in the square (of Kypseli)… I told her that I will send the child to this kindergarten and she brought there her child too. And when I cannot take my child from the kindergarten she takes her, and when she can not I take hers”. (L.I., Albania). In the Blognina case study, the park is also an important place to observe the forms of interaction among children, and among their parents too. Visibility and /co-presence in public spaces contributes to gradually turn the ‘unfamiliar’ into ‘familiar’: for locals, the presence of migrant women and their children in the squares, the supermarkets or the local shops is no more an unusual sight; for migrant women these same places have become part of a daily routine which bears characteristics of coexistence. This is not to underestimate the inequalities and power relations built into this coexistence and interaction between locals and migrants, nor to equate public spaces of the neighbourhood (and the city) with the lacking mechanisms of social integration. But it is not to underestimate either that public spaces have to include, and not to exclude, people, activities, encounters…  “(Here there are people) from Syria, (they are) from Romania, Bulgaria, Poland… there these girls are from Turkey. I know all of them. This guy is from Turkey… He is one year here. He sleeps in the square for one year. And the other day I took him with me, in my house, he took a bath, he ate with me. He does not have a job. Someone has stolen his wallet, his mobile, his passport, everything… Now he is waiting for a passport (and money) for tickets… to return. […]Here come people from Syria. Look now, look there, they are over 20 children. And many Kurds come here. Those on this bench are Kurds. Two of them have gone. They left two. There are too many people who have families with children… Here there are women and children…” (M.O, Syria) The in-depth interviews and the participant observations in Bolognina also show very interesting results about co-presence and coexistence in Bologna’s periphery. The fieldwork done at the Salon Marrakech, a barber shop in the centre of Bolognina, very close to Piazza dell’Unità allowed us to observe that there are people from Maghreb, as well as other African or Asia countries. Some Italian men use Salon Marrakech, because it is cheap, and it is a space of frequentation in Bolognina for some years. Moreover, among the clients of the barber shop there are some Afro-Americans, who are players of the local basketball teams. There are migrants who live in Bolognina, but also who live in other neighbourhoods. They go to the salon to chat, to meet, to discuss of soccer championship or their problems. And sometimes they cut their hair. The language continuously shifts at least between Italian, Arabic, and French, and sometimes other languages. In short, Salon Marrakech is one of the many examples in the contemporary cities of a transnational urban space: that is to say, it is not only the addition of different community, cultural or linguistic belongings, but it is a new space that is at the same time the hybridizing and something of different from their constituent parts. Also, the urban spaces are “places of splitting in two”. These are the words used by Leila, a woman from Iraq, with a degree in engineering. She is 39, with a father from Iraq, a mother from Turkey; Leila and her Kurdish husband are political refugees in Italy. Leila talks of a sort of double consciousness (Du Bois 1903; Gilroy 1993), embodied in the two-ness of her sons, of being at the same time Italian and Arabic, that is to say, of being nor Italian nor Arabic.The urban spaces and its uses are a good mirror to analyze the process of construction of a double identity, or maybe imagined identities (Anderson 1983). And according to Leila, in this process there is a gender difference: “Despite she’s very young, I’ve the impression that it will be very hard to educate my daughter. Despite the family and the frequent travels to Iraq and Turkey, she’s very influenced by her schoolfellows. She’s only 6 and she asked for new dresses and designer shoes. Maybe this is a way of being ‘peer.’ Of course, I cannot satisfy her desires, I have to explain what their consumeristic and homologated desires mean. With the males I’ve not so much problem, because they’re critics with regard to youth behaviours and the consumerism. Instinctually, they don’t like the girls who go to school or they meet in the square with navel showing.” At the same time, beyond teaching the traditions and behaviours of their “culture”, the goal and task of Leila – “in my role of mum” – is “to contribute that my sons are more and more Italian, they have to love this country. Because if they love Italy, they can take all the opportunities of this country and this city, and contribute to its democratic and social development. This is the reason because I love Italy too, despite I cannot renegade my identity of Iraq woman. In fact, I’m very proud of my identity.” Besides this, the precarious residential conditions under which a high percentage of the immigrant population lives, has led to an intensive use of public spaces that some authors have denominated “compensatory agglomeration” (Martínez, 1997), which leads to conflicts and confrontations regarding what is considered to be an inadequate use of the public space: “Dominicans... let’s see, I understand that their lifestyle is different to ours, they are people who live like we used to live 50 years ago, they live in the streets with reaggeton (...) It’s the Caribbean, it’s the way they are, I understand, they speak yelling, so this summer that has been so hot, having everything open, you have them inside your house” (Discussion group with autochthonous neighbours, October 15th, 2009, 9:00 pm). The fact that many people live in the same house is interpreted more as a matter of custom, determined by the culture of origin, that as the product of socio-economic inequalities, the high cost of housing, discrimination and racism (of real estate agencies and of property owners) that are suffered by most immigrants at the moment of renting a place to live. The migration project and the transnational organization of migrant families are also important factors that affect the forms of inhabitation of a house. From this perspective, the sharing or subleasing of a property by several people can be interpreted as a strategy to achieve the migration goals, that in most cases –as revealed by our interviews and previous researches- are connected to paying off financial debts in the country of origin and/or debts resulting from the migration, to sustaining spouses, children, parents and/or siblings, to improving or buying a house in the country of origin, to reunificating the family, to setting up a business. The migrants who have no permission have to find specific ways in the city: they design a new cartography. Based on this, we could also understand the different and changing times of the urban spaces. That is to say, the researcher has to follow the interviewed in her trajectories in the city, in order to draw the new urban maps. In fact, in the contemporary cities the migrants are space invaders (Puwar 2004), in the double meaning of the concept. On one hand, they are seen as space invaders by a part of the local population; on the other hand, they invade the urban and public spaces, re-thinking and re-signifying places that were not born for them. That is to say, building up a new concept of the public space.Different Uses and Conceptions of the Public Space: gender and generation Gender (like class, ethnicity, sexuality, age) determines to a large extent which bodies belong where (who are “strangers” in a particular space), what spatial experiences different individuals and groups live (eg. how safe does a migrant women feel in a public square), what techniques of exclusion correspond to particular bodies (eg. what rules of appearance make the bodies of migrant women “strange” in public spaces). Such questions are an indication of formal and informal regulations of space, through which unequal conditions of access and exclusion are formed at different scales and among different women and men from different ethnic backgrounds and diverse migratory projects. Gender is a variable that conditions the forms of circulating the neighbourhood. Different interviewees agreed in pointing out that, in general, women are seen more during the day: in social services, courses, doctors offices, school doors, neighbourhood parties, squares, and very often with their boys and girls. Male presence is dominant in certain bars, in parks, in corners and mainly at night. In-depth interviews as well as systematic observation help us understand how gender relations are played out in the public spaces of the neighbourhood. A first and rather obvious observation is that migrant women use the public spaces of their neighbourhood more intensively, because they perform there a variety of domestic and care activities, which are not usually considered as “real work”, like the daily shopping for the family, escorting the children to kindergartens or schools, taking them to the health centres etc. – activities which men do not seem to undertake. “We do not go to cafeterias or something like that. Because the child does not sit quietly… O.K. once in a month we may go to Goody’s (a local fast food chain). If I work in the afternoon I cannot go anywhere. I cannot because I am tired and I have to work in the house (to do the domestic chores). If you come home at 3:30 (pm), you pick up the child… until you come and change her clothes from school and have lunch… it is already 5:00 o’clock. You cannot sit for a moment until 7:30. You can go nowhere. You want to sit and rest in your home. When the weather is good, I go for a walk with my daughter. We usually go to Kypseli square”. (L.I., Albania) The fact that migrant women are the ones who assume responsibility to create ‘homely’ environments in the city and to make ends meet in their households, has to do to a large extent with the family traditions of their country and gender relations linked with it. But their precarious position is also reinforced by the family migraton policies, as well as by the characteristic of the famale labor market in the receiving countries. On the other hand, in the Kypseli case study, migrant women have more opportunities to communicate with local people (mainly women) than men do. They discuss with their employers, their friends, their neighbours, the people who they meet in the shops, the mothers of their children’s friends who they meet in the school or in public spaces like Kypseli square. The discussions they have with locals seem to have great emotional and practical importance for them, since they make them “feel like home” and give them information that they need about different issues of their lives. On the contrary, migrant men do not seem to have so much direct contacts with locals as women do. What we observed in Kypseli square, during a whole day long, in spring and in summer time is characteristic: a group of 6-8 immigrants goes to the square almost every afternoon and plays domino on a makeshift table which they hide in the trees before they leave. Another group of men, locals this time, borrow that table in order to play cards, without saying a word. This ‘silent’ activity reveals a un-confessed communication-agreement between migrants and locals and at the same time a silent acceptance of the presence of migrants in the(ir) local space. This lack of verbal communication it is evident in migrants’ in-depth interviews. None of them talks with locals when they go to relax in public spaces, not even with their neighbours. In Poble Sec, the use of the public space is also affected by gender relations, as well as ethnic relations. There is an invisibilisation of Pakistani women and a minority presence of Moroccan women carrying out tasks connected to the field of social reproduction: walking with their children and shopping for groceries. In the words of Isham: “[Moroccan women] get together in parks, get together at parties, I mean baptisms, small parties at their houses. For a baptism, for example, they invite everybody and they get together” (Moroccan woman, works in the Poble Sec office of  ATIMCA, Association of Moroccan Immigrant Workers of Catalonia). Opposed to this, there is the hiper-visibilisation of Dominican women –around hairdressing salons, chatting and well dressed- who escape the roles assigned to migrant women: carers for their own and others’ children and elderly people and responsible for guaranteeing the emotional stability of the husband and the migrant family. The fact that these immigrant women make the hairdresser’s a place of social gathering generates a certain discomfort in some of our female interviewees, especially amongst Catalan women of older age. In Bolognina the use of the public space from a gender perspective is inseparably linked to the idea of independence and freedom for the migrant women This is the case of Amina: she has 29 and came from Morocco, she is in Italy for 15 years: “I want to live my freedom in Bologna, and to go independent around the city.” But, Amina says, this doesn’t mean that Italian cities are spaces of freedom: “I’m really incensed with the obsession for the veil in Italy, and not only in Italy. It’s impossible to say that this is a free country, if a woman cannot dress herself as she wants, and maybe dress a veil. In Morocco you can find everything, from the miniskirt to the veil. Therefore in Morocco there is more freedom than in Italy!” Althought the question of the veil is one of the most mentioned in the interviews with the migrant women, the Italian glance with regard to the veil in the public spaces is changed. This is the opinion of Ransura, a woman who comes from a small village very close to Hammamet: she is in Italy for five years, and she was looking for a city. “I dress the handkerchief [veil]. I have noted a change in the glances of Italian for some months, since there is the economic crisis: now they look at me as a person they want to go away, not desired. […] I asked to a social worker for an help: I don’t want money, but only an help to find a municipal house, because I want to continue to live in the city. She answered: what do you want? What are you doing here? Why you don’t come back in your country?” The buses are a good standpoint to analyze the quality of the relationship between Italian and migrants in the public spaces, as well as the increasing of the forms of racism. Here it is possible to analyze the relations of glances (Du Bois, 1903) between migrants and Italian, that is to say, the relations of power too. Najat, a woman from Morocco, says: “The public transportations allow me to reveal the realities of the migrants and Italian, and their interactions. When I take a bus I’m pestered by glances, threatening glances, mainly recently with the economic crisis. […] I heard a lot of people who say that the foreigners don’t pay the ticket. Some days ago the inspector asked for the ticket: I have the monthly ticket, while the Italian who said this had no ticket!”  In front of these “threatening glances” and provocations the migrants are not passive victim, as the “philanthropic glance” draws them. The images of victimhood (Puwar 2003) is broken when the migrant women took the voice. This is the case of Najat: “Some months ago I was on the bus towards Piazza dell’Unità, there was a woman from Pakistan or Bangladesh who was moving slowly; an Italian man shouted: ‘come back to your country!’ I tried to not react, but I heard two Italian women who said: ‘in their countries they travel with the asses.’ Then I answered: ‘maybe they travel with the asses, but in your country the asses take the buses!’” The Barcelona case study has pointed out the age as a important factor in the use and conflict around public space. The fieldwork in Poble Sec has shown a competition for the use of public spaces that is marked by intergenerational relations, regardless of the national origin, which serves as ground for explaining convergences, understandings and confrontations, mainly in terms of territory appropriation. Our observations indicate that the intensive and expansive use of pedestrian Blai St. after 5 pm generates a conflict between boys, girls and teenagers (mainly male and of Dominican origin) and the elderly neighbours that have lived there their whole lives and who walk their dogs at the same time. In some accounts, these problems connected to the dispute over the same space by the different generations that inhabit the neighbourhood are interpreted from a culturalist perspective, reformulating them as problems of cultural difference and distance. The contrast between the views expressed in the interviews with Spanish neighbours and those manifested by most of the immigrants from different nationalities is suggestive. While for the first ones, the children playing in the streets are all immigrants who play amongst themselves, who do not relate with others and who do nothing but bother elderly people, the second ones point to the practices of boys, girls and youngsters from the neighbourhood as an example of understanding and relation between nationals and foreigners. “On Blai St., children play a lot because they don’t have anywhere else to play (...) because there is no park in the neighbourhood or nearby where they can go and play. So everyday after they finish school, you can see the children playing here. And they all play together, those from here with those from other countries, all together without problem” (Venezuelan woman, owns a clothing shop on Blai St.). School (both public and semi-public) also appears in some interviews as the place where the little ones relate naturally with peers from anywhere in the world. The hegemonic discourse, widely present in the mediatic and political fields, connects migration to insecurity in the public space. This securitarian view of migrations also appears in some of our interviews, as well as diverse forms in which public space, security/insecurity and migration are articulated. An articulation that is also affected by gender relations in origin and destination, by age, by the particular life trajectories. This image of the place of emigration as safer as the place of origin may be already changing, as a consequence of the impact that economic crisis is having on the labour conditions of the immigrant population. The testimonies of the immigrant population as well as those of the key informants who work in social services point to the economic insecurity generated by the crisis and the recession in Spain, Italy and Greece. The economic restructuring and the transformations of the productive system which began in the late 1970s did not only modify the forms of organisation of salaried labour, but they also implied the advent of new relationships in other fields of social life. The development of the new production and communication technologies opened the way for the automatisation of the productive process and to industrial delocalisation. Both dynamics implied a progressive decrease in the need for workforce in industrialised countries and this was reflected on migration policies with the suspension of foreign workers hiring and with the launching of the process of closing the borders. But the most devastating effect of questioning the centrality of the labour factor has not been so much the unemployment as the degradation of employment and of the salaried status; precarisation, though less spectacular, is the most defining feature. The destabilisation of the stable is the nucleus of the new social question (Castel 1997, Bauman 2000). The social fracture no longer divides a majority of integrated from the inhabitants of the system’s peripheries, but it breaks the same heart of the labour market, where there is a minority labour aristocracy with safe employment, good salary and social benefits, and a majority of fragile subjects, who cultivate the culture of the random, as precariousness has become their destiny. In tune with these transformations, post-fordist migrations have very different characteristics from the ones of the 1960s: (1) greater diversity of origins and growing feminisation of flows, in direct relation to the globalisation dynamics that connect more and more territories and countries every time; (2) intensification of migration in a context of restrictive policies that  have had the effect of the irregularisation of certain population movements, and (3) migrations linked to the expansion of the labour demand of those sectors of the economy that are forced to keeping their labour costs low and connection between immigrant workers and flexible and precarious sub-employment in a context of labour and union deregularisation (Pedreño Cánovas, 2005). These are the features that characterise, in general, the migration flows that have arrived in Southern Europe since the mid-1980s, against the background of that deregularisation of labour. This is also the global context in which the life and working conditions of the interviewed migrants are inserted. In the Italian case, a strict relation between Bolognina’s industrial past and its popular present characterizes the study. The memory of its industrial past reflects on the local residents, particularly among those that witnessed the period of deindustrialization and the subsequent abandonment of most of the factories that used to constitute the soul of the neighbourhood. However, most of the migrant population came after of at the beginning of this process. Today, the whole area is under a process of transformation that will transform it in the new administrative centre of the City. This transformation is happening without any involvement of the migrant and working-class communities that live in the neighbourhood. A constant in all the interviews with the immigrant population is this link between migration and labour. That is: all the testimonies explain the migration project as a strategy to get a better job. This “better job” does not always imply better working conditions, but it does provide a higher income and it allows the migrant to improve the life conditions of relatives (children, spouses, parents) who live in the country of origin through the sending of remittances “I always say that the only good thing about here, because to me it is good, is that one has her job, her salary, and that’s it. That I have my job and that is the good thing. Over there it is very difficult to have a salary that pays enough to afford an apartment. On the contrary, here I have my salary, I have treated my self to some things I wanted to buy and I have the possibility of sending it to my daughter for her school and for the things she wants. That is the only thing I have found here” (Ecuadorian woman works at a bar in Poble Sec); In this framework, economic and legal reasons push migrants to accept any kind of job. In the Italian study, a common phrase during interviews were “there is no choice” and “I did every kind of job”. The absence of family or the fact that families are often involved in the migration project in the sense that there are then many expectations from the people that sent them abroad as kind of investment, thus leaving migrants often feeling like they have “their families on their shoulders”. One male said “I did everything, I did leafleting, porter, bricklayer, bouncer, then I learned to fix computers and things began to change”. Almost all migrants have experienced of the harshness of a law that can throw its shadow on migrant life at any moment; for many, they relate this to a sense of insecurity and precariousness. In all the case studies one point is immediately evident: the relation between labor and public spaces changes completely depending on labor and legal conditions and, particularly for women, on the fact of having a job or not. Uria is a domestic assistant for elderly and sick people. She works for a cooperative with a regular contract and she’s quite satisfied with her job. Asked if she passes by Bolognina during her days, she answered: “Oh, yes, every day. You can find the Muslim butcher’s shop, the market. I pass by piazza dell’Unità almost every day, first when I go to work; I often commute there, then when I came back home with my daughter after school. During the summer we stop for an ice cream or a slice of pizza near the bus stop. Some days I pass by four times”. In Poble Sec, many of the migrants interviewees work and live in the neighbourhood, especially those who have their own shop: greengrocer’s, hairdresser’s, butcher’s, locutorio, restaurant. Others reside in other neighbourhoods of Barcelona or in the suburban areas and only work in Poble Sec, but due to the long working hours, they spend more time in Poble Sec than in their place of residence “I work from Monday to Sunday. Now this month that has started, February, I get up at 6 and I come to work until 8 at night. I’m here all day, I don’t go home at all. And on Saturdays I come at 2 pm. And the same on Sundays. And on Saturdays I get up at 10 am. While I have breakfast, I chat a little with my mom, then it’s noon, I shower and dress up and it is the time and I come here. Time flies and I finish at 8” (Ecuadorian woman works at a bar in Poble Sec). When we consider the relation between labor and the use of public spaces we need to take into account different dimensions of labor. Labor shapes the relationships between migrants and public spaces but the informality of many labor relations leave migrants the opportunity to build complex networks of relations and movements inside the city that exceed simple labor relations. On the other hand, labor plays a key role in the definition of social relations for migrants. This aspect is involved in all social relations while also having an impact on gender relations. Although the Italian study found that, for women, having a job means autonomy, or at least the definition a proper space of independence from the will and the power of males, in the Spanish study this link between work and women autonomy is not that clear. Spaces of socialization, working place and residence are related in complicated way. In our case studies many of the women interviewed use public spaces as part of their domestic-work dynamics (market, parks, schools). In Poble Sec workplace also operates as the space for interrelation with the neighbours, because most of the interviewed are employed in the service sector “For me, the neighbourhood is fine. On this street I know a lot of people, I almost know everybody here, the workers, the people from the shop (...) There are good people. It is easier because there are many foreigners. There are Dominicans, there are Chinese -but they came a short while ago-, there are others from Pakistan, Ecuadorians, also Bolivians” (Pakistani man1 works at a restaurant on Blai St., lives in Poble Sec). In Bolognina Fabien, a male from Cameroun in his 40s, observed the complexity in the relation among space of sociality and the workplace. “work is different… you go where you find a job and that is not related to the place where you leave. Then, after work, most migrants go back home because they can only find places to gather but in the area where they live. Generally speaking, these three things, labor, residency and sociality, are not related”. Nonetheless, this relation can be seen from a very different point of view, tracing different social maps, a cartography of the city not necessarily overlapping with the spatial topography (see http://www.iger.org/mappeurbane-d-30.html). For example, one of the interviewee points out that “in the workplace, friendships are created for a portion of time”. Job produces a sociality, sometimes this sociality reflects itself in the use of public spaces and in the social relations outside it, as one of the interviewee said “I’ve met many of my friends in the workplace”, but many times it is just a part of this complex network and, in an hostile landscape, can be recognized as a site of safety that provides a sense of familiarity. In terms of the labour trajectories in the migration, certain differences regarding gender can be established on the basis of the testimonies. Men tend to work or have worked in construction and in service (waiters, cooks, supermarket cashiers, employees at a locutorio). Throughout the years, some of them have managed to set up their own companies in both sectors. In the case of women, for most of them (and/or for their mothers) domestic/care work has been the first job they have had in Spain, Italy or Greek, and generally this is the way through which they have obtained the regularisation.  In the Spanish case, together with agriculture, all these sectors have been the most affected by the deregulation of labour, which was set in motion in the mid-1980s and deepened during the 1990s. This reflects, amongst on other things, on the long workdays and the few days off.   Other interviewees work as waiters, others are in charge of their own shops (clothing shops, hairdresser’s, greengrocer’s) and others work in cleaning services. An important proportion of them have been working in an irregular situation, especially those who arrived a longer time ago, when they still did not need a visa to enter as tourists “-[Her father] worked in construction without papers... Then he ran into people who wouldn’t pay him when the time came to pay. They took a lot of advantage of them. And of course, you had to work, you had to take the risk.  If they are going to pay me, great, but if they won’t pay you, you don’t know. - How did he get the papers? Could he have some company get them for him? - Of course. He managed to get someone to make him a contract and have his papers done for him. If you were a woman, it was easier because you would go to a family house without papers and then they would make you a contract. It was that way for me. The same for my mother.” The over-exploitation can be found not only amongst migrants who are employed by others. Migrants who have their own small shops also find themselves forced to working all day, every day of the week in order to fulfil their migration project.“Well, there’s no other way around it. Work at the greengrocer’s is the only thing I’ve got and if I close earlier, then you don’t make the same money as always and well... you can’t close early. But usually I stay until 10 pm. Now I think I’ll maybe close at 9:30 pm. (...) We open at 9:30 in the morning and we close at 10 at night. Everyday is the same.” (Bolivian woman has a greengrocer’s on Blai St., lives upstairs from her shop). Vital conditions imposed by a life dedicated to work shape the use given to public spaces. Probably that is why the interviewed migrants who work in the neighbourhood, whether they live there or not, do not frequent leisure places or experience that bohemian side advertised by the “Poble Sec brand”. Most of them go from their house to work and vice versa, and gatherings with friends tend to take place in other neighbourhoods or at their homes. In the Greek case study, women who work as domestic workers or carers are usually very careful to save money for the extra burden, for possible “difficult” days, for their children and/or grandchildren. This is one of the main reasons why they avoid going to places where they have to pay. For men things are a little better: as they usually work in construction or as waiters, their employers pay at least part of their social security contributions in order to avoid problems with Labour Inspections. However, they also are concerned to save money: in order to help their families who are left back, to contribute to family income and to their children’s education, or to save in order to start a business of their own when they return to their places of origin.   Bommes and Geddes (2000) have explored how the decisional and organisational infrastructure of the different types of Welfare States affects the forms adopted by immigration management in each country. In the beginnings of the 1990s, the Spanish public administration adopted a discourse that privileged the action of NGOs in the management of social matters, based on the understanding that they are more agile, they have a greater flexibility and capacity to adapt to changing demands, they know better and are closer to social problems, they use resources better and they encourage participation, solidarity and social cohesion. Following this tradition, until the mid-1990s, social policies aimed at the immigrant population were displayed by the Non-Government Organisations (Giménez Romero 1995, Dietz 2000). Throughout the last decades, immigrant support groups related to the Church as well as to non-confessional organizations  like neighbours associations, community organisations, sections of worker unions and immigrants associations have emerged as renown and competent counterparts (Dietz 2000). In the field of Spanish migration policies, the combination of the axes centralism/federalisation and statism/privatisation has given impulse to a third tendency: the gradual but evident movement from universalist and generalist approaches (normalisation) to particularist and multicultural measures (Agrela y Dietz 2005). The Poble Sec study have confirmed this three tendencies in previous researches (Gil Araujo 2010, Agrela 2006), and also in the fieldwork, where we saw and important labour carried out by immigrants, women and neighbours associations in the management of programmes promoted and funded by the municipal government. Also the Church covers an outstanding role in the assistance of the most vulnerable immigrant population in Poble Sec, especially the undocumented and unemployed, and also works in connection with the neighbourhood’s social services. This way, in the framework of a social assistance system that defends normalisation, mechanisms of differential assistance are implemented through the services provided by different types of Non-Government Organisations, to which a great portion of the immigrants tends to be referred, regardless of their legal status or the time they have been living in Spain “We work with all the collectives, but in the neighbourhood we are defined as for Moroccan collectives (...) They even need to make an appointment with the neighbourhood’s social worker, and then: ‘Moroccan, you need some help, then get out of here’; financial assistance (we do not process that here but we do provide information on where to go, how to do it, and we even help them with that), but if it is a Moroccan, they do not hesitate (...) but in the end we are the referent of an entity that works here in the neighbourhood but for the Moroccan collective” (Moroccan woman works at ATIMCA, Association of Moroccan Immigrant Workers of Catalonia). The services offered by these institutions are really diverse: legal assistance, language lessons, job searching, food assistance, family support, translation. Services that are provided by public social services to the great majority of Spanish citizens. Women are the target of most activities of these organisations because they are considered to be in greater need of support. The purpose of these interventions is to promote their participation, emancipation, education, instruction, and to debate topics that should be of their interest. In the institutional discourse, managing diversity after the arrival of immigrants translates into the issue of coexistence that emphasises much more the cultural differences than the socio-economic inequalities. At this point, intercultural mediators appear, as well as the organisation of language lessons (both of Catalan and Spanish) and the matter is expressed in municipal plans, mediation services and NGOs’ activities. Some of the arguments express what we could denominate the Catalan philosophy of integration, which underlies in the hegemonic views of Catalan public officials, politicians, NGOs, scholars and policy makers. As well as the ethnic diversity that made Poble Sec a very suitable place to carry out the investigation on the use of public space by local people and migrants, the variety and richness of the social movements –the other object of research of the Work Package– was also important when it came to choosing the borough to do the fieldwork. At the beginning of the 20th century Poble Sec had a large working class, characterised by trade union militancy, and the Anarchist and Anticlerical movements. With the end of the dictatorship and the return to democracy, organisations of all kinds began to re-emerge in the borough: in 1973 the Residents Association was founded with broad representation of the political parties and aware social groups. At that time, the local residents began to make demands in an area where there were no green spaces and no urban improvements. In 1989, in order to promote joint actions the Poble Sec Entities Coordination Committee was created and today the borough has a very active network of associations including about 80 entities and organisations gathered under this great federation (www.poblesec.org). The Agora, former municipal market, of Kypseli is one of the main places of the Greek fieldwork, because of its connections with local and antiracist movements and its orientation towards grass roots activities which make a conscious effort to be inclusive for migrants.  People who are in solidarity to migrants try to “cover” the gaps of the Greek migration policies. One interesting such activity is the “School”, i.e. courses of Greek language offered to migrants for free, by volunteer teachers, most of the whom  were involved in Left politics before taking part in the Agora squat. Similar schools exist nowadays in many different neighbourhoods in Athens and Piraeus Most of the students in Agora are men. Migrant women probably don’t have the networks in order to learn about the courses and participate; many of them don’t have free time as a large proportion of them work as live-in carers. Some of the migrant women probably don’t have the freedom to participate. In contrast to this most of the teachers are women. As it was stated also in the discussions with the teachers they volunteered because they found it useful to offer some knowledge as a factual solidarity, in the sense of “really doing something”. Probably this perspective of participation in politics – at the level of sharing knowledge in every day life - has a gender aspect, something that is tactile and has a visible result, even for few people. From the Greek team’s point of view, in spaces like the Agora, as also in different ways Kypseli Square, hybrid identities of mixing, solidarity and communication are beginning to form. Teachers try to question their “clear” identities, their ethnic, gender, and cultural preconceptions, in order to construct more equal relations with migrant/students with whom they cooperate in the classes. On the other hand, migrant men and women try to re-locate themselves in the context of the School –a place that operates quite differently from other places of everyday life, like work or neighbourhood: there they build on their experiences, sharing them with the experiences of other migrant and native people. In places like Agora new spaces operate, within which co-habitation and co-existence, with all the problems and conflicts that occur, can actually take place. In these kinds of places the resistance to a dominant discourse of fear, racism and xenophobia is an every day practice, beginning in the very local scale of the body and the neighbourhood but expanding -as a set of practices, experiences and narratives- through different channels and networks to several interrelated sociospatial scales from the city to the global regime. In the Italian Study, almost all the interviewees complain about the absence of public policies dedicated to the city’s growing migrant presence. While Bolognina is recognized as a meeting place and where freetime can be spent, they complain about the absence of social aggregation spaces. This is particularly true for those more involved in activities such associations or social projects. Beyond these complaints, the creation of distressed areas is not the main problem that migrants face. The main issue at stake is the absence of public spaces able to respond to this demographically shifting situation. Almost all the interviewees expect something from the municipality or the neighbourhood: a common grievance is that they live in the city, but the city doesn’t give them places to meet or organize their activities. In the Italian study, as well as in the Spanish case, integration and cultural difference seem to be relevant terms in the way in which institutions and people (included migrants) think about migration. The interviewees not directly involved in activities like associations have a larger view in many cases. We can observe how although the legal environment is the same, for this group of people this seems to be an immediate issue, while for others the “integration” project seems to be a path towards a better future. Their legal condition doesn’t disappear but it stands in the background of the discourse about “integration”: people that believe in “integration” stress the role of culture, community and education. This very last point, education, can be seen from different angles depending of these different sensibilities. One of the interviewee that is involved in multicultural projects related the non-recognition of migrants’ degree in Italy as part of the cultural problem and lack of integration. Others, instead, relate their problems directly to the law and to a more general racist environment that surrounds migrants. Related to the Italian Union, some migrants complain that Unions acted poorly for migrant’s rights. Najat is a metalworker and member of the metalworkers union (FIOM) has been very active in the last years, organizing strikes for metalworkers’ contracts and working conditions. We asked her what she expecta from the union: “You feel they back you, but the only thing they do is help you in bureaucratic questions. But they’ve done nothing to guard migrants’ rights”. When asked what a union should do for migrants, she answers: “I speak as worker in general, and then as immigrant: I didn’t hear the CGIL do anything to vindicate workers in this crisis. [..] They came to my factory a few times, they organized an assembly, they made their speeches, collect memberships, but then nothing has changed. [..] I heard about the last strike on the TV. [..] I always went on strike but I’m the only one who does at my workplace, this last time I didn’t even know there was strike, nobody came to tell us.” Yet we know migrant numbers are growing in trade unions, mainly in the CGIL (the largest left-wing union) and CISL (a catholic union) and, even though for our interviewees the union works as a helpful office, they don’t see in the union a possible solution of their problems.  Migration, Transnational Practices and Belongings The theoreticians of the transnationalism perspective state that transnational practices of migrant families entail a challenge to the nation-states competence, which guarantees rights, reinforces duties and defends traditional notions of identity associated to national citizenship (Tambini 2001). At the same time, on the arena of political debate, there is a discussion around the dangers posed by the processes of migrant transnationalism to the national identity of the countries receivers of immigration. In addition, politicians, political analysts, policy makers and some mediatic discourses argument that the multiple alliances and different forms of citizenship interfere with the integration of the immigrant population in the places of destination. However, according to Leitner and Ehrkamp (2006), migrants' perspectives on citizenship are rarely examined in either academic or public policy debates, which concentrate instead on broader legal -political aspects of citizenship- changes in national citizenship laws and policies and/or normative arguments about how citizenship should be conceived -making claims about immigrants' attitudes towards citizenship from afar (Bauböck, 1994; 2003; Miller, 2000; Soysal, 1994). The empirical results of this research allow us to confirm some questions that we have presented in other researches (Pedone and Gil Araujo, 2008; Pedone, 2010): transnational practices and the consequent consolidation of social transnational fields does not necessarily interfere with the feeling of belonging to the places of settlement. Besides, the already introduced concept of positionality enables us to understand how the immigrant population creates meaning, ascribes to values and practices citizenship rights according to gender, social class, time of arrival, legal status, education level and the different migration strategies and trajectories. One of the main findings of the present research is that citizenship practices led by the migrant population are produced at multiple scales and involve multiple public spheres that cross national borders and renegotiate relations between their homes in origin and in destination. This suggests that citizenship practices exceed the limits and jurisdictions of the nation-state. Many of the testimony collected in our field works contradict the simplistic conception that understands migration as leaving one place and arriving and settling at another and show that things are much more varied and complex. Some migrants have a mobile life with multiple belongings and relatives residing in different parts of the world. They tend to spend periods of time at the country of origin and then some other months or years at the country of immigration, taking advantage of the freedom granted by the access to nationality The local territorial identification presents no contradiction with the claim for citizenship rights and with the exercise of transnational family, social, economic and political practices. Informal encounters and contacts of various kinds with both migrants and locals shape a different urban landscape in which the neighbourhood (re)emerges as a site of inclusion, in which practices of mutual assistance and participation in city life acquire an almost forgotten importance. People without formal rights in the places where they live their everyday life can and do take part in a variety of activities and at times find ways of political expression. Here the neighbourhood represents an on-going project of creating, transforming and improving spaces, relationships and activities among multiple communities which inhabit it, a forum of confrontations and mutual adaptations and intercultural interactions which affect migrants but also locals. Some narratives understand that citizenship rights are an important subject in everyday lives of the migrant population. They determine their access to work and housing, their security, their transnational mobility and their participation in the social and economic spheres. For this reason, interviewed migrants insist on the need to access citizenship rights dissociated from the “national feeling”. In the words of Moroccan woman: “Up to the moment, I (and I speak for myself) haven’t had that feeling of saying I’m Catalan or I’m Spanish, I am Moroccan. Now, in terms of rights and duties, I am a citizen. Yes, I am a citizen with rights and duties... I don’t know, I’m a citizen of this country until the day I return there, or I don’t know. The majority does not feel Catalan. We are citizens, and when they claim, they claim for their rights and they know their duties” (Moroccan woman works at the Poble Sec office of ATIMCA). The diverse transnational practices that appear in the Poble Sec case study reflect the variety of migration projects of interviewed persons. Discourses of those who are in a stage of consolidation of their migration project –regularization of legal status, capitalization, family reunification, investments in destination- show a stronger belonging to the neighbourhood, as well as the need to get involved in associations that may improve their commercial activities in Poble Sec. At the same time, they are involved in transnational practices and in family debates around definite settling and return. For example, an immigrant coming from Dominican Republic who has a prosperous business in the neighbourhood, near Blai St., where they provide money sending services and they sell trips to Latin America, is also the president of an association of Dominican immigrants that sends money to his town of origin for social purposes; a Pakistani businessman that, together with his uncles, owns four shops on Blai St., belongs to the local Traders Association and has an active participation in the meetings that have recently been held in the neighbourhood to discuss the conflicts between the neighbours. This belonging is conjugated with a series of transnational family and economic practices that he has kept up for over a decade: he sends remittances every month not only to his wife and children but also to the extended family according to the amounts he agrees with his uncles to sustain their elders and the rest of the family in Pakistan. The consolidation of family transnationalism can be seen as a result of the legal restrictions to obtain and keep a work permit and to apply for the reunification of sons and daughters at destination. In the cases in which the migration has been headed by a woman, the exercise of transnational maternity has ended up exceeding the period of time contemplated in the design of the migration project. Thus, young Dominican and Ecuadorian women continue to negotiate there mother role with grandmothers, sisters and sisters-in-law who form the care network in the place of origin. In other cases, when the migration has been headed by a man, as it is the case of the immigration coming from Pakistan, the social transnational fields consolidate because many of them have remained for many years in a situation of legal irregularity and managing to meet the necessary requirements for family reunification has been a very long process. An important number of these migrants has got married and had children during their temporary returns to origin, but they still cannot achieve family reunification at destination. According to recurrent accounts of the delays caused by the Spanish consulates in the places of origin, these are becoming more and more an informal practice of restriction of rights. And that is why some prefer to wait to obtain nationality (10 years) to make sure they will not have those kinds of restrictions. Those families that consider settling definitively at the place of destination do not hence cease to encourage their transnational family practices: “We always go back on vacation to visit the family. Sometimes my children travel alone because, since their mother lives there, they spend all their holidays with her and her family. They really like to go there. We still want to settle here because there we see no stability. If that changes some day, then we’ll consider that possibility, but my sons want to study here. (Dominican man, member of the Poble Sec Traders Association). However, the idea of a long-term return is a project that tends to star blurring out as sons and daughters grow up and study at the places of destination: “For now, I don’t think I’ll be here... Not an official return, but yes in many years from now (...) But then when I think about it, it is a little complicated. Because if you want to go back to your country of origin, you mustn’t have children. My daughter was born here, and although she recognizes the Moroccan culture and she goes down to Morocco, she’ll feel from here, more than I do. She’ll be more comfortable here, because she will have her childhood friends. There will come a time when she’ll say ‘I’m from here, I can’t come down to Morocco’” (Moroccan woman works at the Poble Sec office of ATIMCA, Association of Moroccan Immigrant Workers of Catalonia). The empirical results of Kypseli study are centred on the construction of belonging to the neighbourhood and to the city, and on the formation and consolidation of migratory networks. A rather striking observation from the interviews is that almost none of our interviewees have moved from Kypseli since the time of their initial settlement. The migrants who live there for shorter or longer periods of time may have changed houses/flats several times, but always within the neighbourhood itself. Especially Albanian women working as live-out domestic workers, some of whom have arrived more than 15 years ago, emphasise their attachment to the place and the ways in which they have gradually built support networks and have become familiar with the space and the functioning of the area “All, all, all of us around here we are friends. All, we are close […] This is why we do not leave. We are used to the place …You see, like being in my own village now, that is how I feel personally…” (K.E., Albania). The process of settling in Kypseli, as elsewhere, involves intensive networking: relatives and compatriots, who may have been here before, put up newcomers until they find a place of their own, help them navigate through the difficulties of adaptation in the unknown place, provide “tips” about how to cope, are a potential source of emotional and often practical support, although there are also instances of violent confrontations. Family networks in particular seem to play a key role in decisions to migrate as well as in formulating migration projects, albeit in different ways. According to the law, the people we have talked to are “aliens”, irrespective of whether they have legal papers or not, they have no formal “right to the city”. But their regular and embodied presence and practices in the neighbourhood and beyond create space for them. Gender differences come out prominently in this respect: it is women rather than men who engage in those everyday routines which contribute to form familiar spaces in the unfamiliar city. Their ventures into the city start form home and its surroundings which are depicted carefully on their maps  “The house, I have taken it now, it is not even a year, they gave me some more money, I made my life here with a man, so I decided, I am not young any more, when will I enjoy? I pay high rent, I pay it myself, but it is on the 5th floor, like the big ones, and looks to the front, the sun and the big street, it is a little noisy but it is so nice…” (M.R., Ukraine, from a discussion in the Agora) Men’s routines on the other hand are more ordered by the workplace and by passing their leisure time with other men in local cafes or in the square. The map of M.K. is characteristic in this respect: it shows his home and former job (he was recently made redundant), but also the house of a friend and different places where he spends his free time. In the same vein, S.M.’s map identifies his workplace and the routes he takes to reach it, but also the places where he likes to go for a stroll. The repetitive everyday practices do not challenge in any way the status of migrants towards the law or women’s and men’s “duties” and “appropriate” ways to spend their time, however these are determined. But their embodied presence makes claims to participation in urban life and tends to destabilise commonly held ideas about strangers, outsiders or righteous “owners” of everyday public spaces. At the same time, the embodied presence of migrants contributes to familiarise locals with “strangers”. Daily contact and shared practices gradually modifies earlier attitudes, which now take shape not by media representations but by reference to their known and familiar neighbours.  This is not to underestimate of course the persistence of negative reactions and racist/xenophobic attitudes The goal of the Bolognina study was to outline a topography of the presence, and not absence: if it is true, as states for example A. Sayad (1999), that a sense of displacement is created, it also true that both here and there migrants operates a redefinition of their presence.  The migrants themselves often create sociality, and almost all the interviewees remember as complicated their first experience in Italy. A common tract of Italy seems to ignorance and a lack of curiosity for what Italians don’t know. Migrants move, they came here with an experience of movement, they often don’t know the place and the language, but what they meet here are other people that have the same ignorance about the world, but never moved from home. The hardness of the first period in Italy brings many to maintain the possibility to come back, a possibility that always remain open, but then very rarely becomes true. To come back would be the defeat of the subjective project: everyone moved for some reason, and the only real return without defeat should be the fulfillment of a project. This happens sometimes with people that are able to build a house in their village or city, or to open small business there and then come back. Migrants from Morocco tell stories about portions of their villages that become “Italians,” because former migrants moved back bringing with them signs of Italian taste, from the name of the shops to the opening of a pizzeria or coffee shop. Putting together different indications coming from the interviews, we can trace a double map that brings here elements of the countries of origins, and brings in those countries elements of Italy. This is particularly true when – as often happens – familiar or communitarian links create a connection between a particular village, or city neighbourhood, in the country of origin and Bologna. The redefinition of presence is reflected for example in the case of a man from Senegal, that describes his experience as hardness, but then says that he finally found himself here, and discovered himself as an African once here in Italy: “Leaving your home opens up your eyes. Once I left my house I found my real identity, something I was unable to see while in Senegal. Here I discovered I’m an African and what does it means, and I’m happy to be an African and I thanks my parents because I was born in Africa.” Most migrants have multiple belongings, many of the interviewees see themselves, after few years, as Italians, but undoubtedly their sense of italianness is different from the one experienced from Italian citizens. Again, the law plays a role in the definition of this belonging: migrants are always pushed back to their own separate identity by institutional marks of separation – one example is the lines they have to attend to apply for the renewal of their permit. This complex situation brings many to build a presence that is not separated, but is in some way autonomous from the public discourse: their sense of belonging to the city or neighbourhood is thus different from the Italians, but like a network with many nodes, often overlaps with them in specific points. Cultural dimensions play a role, but the main problem from migrants is their precarious presence. Najat describes this situation in this way: “Also if you are here, that doesn’t mean you belong to this country, you don’t have the serenity to think ‘I’m here and I can plan my life here,’ because today you’re here, tomorrow you never know. No, you leave day by day.” In the world used by Fabien, from another angle, we can see the role that small bureaucratic steps as residence, meaningless for many Italians, assume for the sense of belonging of migrants: “To be a resident of Bologna means to be recognized and to belong to the territory. For me when I get the residence it was like ‘oh, finally you are part of this society.’ Then to obtain everything after, from the permit to the long-stay permit, they check your residence. To get the residence is an important bureaucratic moment, and is culturally important. It means: ‘I am from Bologna.’” Different perceptions of belongings bring to different imagination about the social and political role migrants can play here. For many, this sense of double absence brings to a political silence, always waiting for the day of return. As Hend said: “They came here to make money, not to live [..]. Many people have the idea to come back in their homeland. They dream about their own house in their homeland. But then, I ask myself, I have to stay here, to sacrifice myself to build a house that I don’t know if I’ll be ever able to see?” Najat instead has a very different perspective: “I don’t think it is right to dream about home. If I’m here I’m here. Many spent here more than ten years, ten years are a lot, and you can’t go back and think to restart all from the beginning. I have to decide: or leave my life here, or in Morocco, I don’t have to kid my self. And when I go back to Marrakech I’m a foreigner, my accent too is changed.” The precariousness migrants leave here brings some to say: “It makes no sense to build your life here, because you work hard, maybe you buy a home, and then you can be deported from a day to another, and that make no sense.” These different attitudes have a great impact in the way migrants conceive their possibility to impact in Italian society and politics, and be involved in struggles. For some, this sense of distance has as a consequence the idea that here Italians rule, that there is no space for them to have their voices heard, this people leave “here, but with their head at home.” But others thinks that “as I’m here, I have to fight here for what I want.” For them, political subjectivity became the moment in which the double absence can be turned into a presence, building new form of participation – and not only the institutionalized forms as associations – and of common activity both with other migrants and Italians. In this context, precariousness transform itself and from the problem that prevents migrants from organize their life, it can be turned into the right they lack: as one of the interviewee said, precariousness is one of the problem for both Italians and migrants, but “migrants have no right to precariousness.” How can we understand this statement? We think in a positive way: vis-à-vis the forced identity that “methodological nationalism” and the discourse of rights related to citizenship, in front of the obligation to have a job whatever it is forced by the law, precariousness as a right means the freedom to organize their lives from a subjective and autonomous angle. One of the main findings of the present research is that citizenship practices led by the migrant population are produced at multiple scales and involve multiple public spheres that cross national borders and renegotiate relations between their homes in origin and in destination. This suggests that citizenship practices exceed the limits and jurisdictions of the nation-state. Many of the testimony collected in our field works contradict the simplistic conception that understands migration as leaving one place and arriving and settling at another and show that things are much more varied and complex. The local territorial identification presents no contradiction with the claim for citizenship rights and with the exercise of transnational family, social, economic and political practices.The empirical results of this research allow us to confirm that transnational practices and the consequent consolidation of social transnational fields does not necessarily interfere with the feeling of belonging to the places of settlement. Besides, the already introduced concept of positionality enables us to understand how the immigrant population creates meaning, ascribes to values and practices citizenship rights according to gender, social class, time of arrival, legal status, education level and the different migration strategies and trajectories. Informal encounters and contacts of various kinds with both migrants and locals shape a different urban landscape in which the neighbourhood (re)emerges as a site of inclusion/exclusion, in which practices of participation in city life acquire hight importance. People without formal rights in the places where they live their everyday life can and do take part in a variety of activities and at times find ways of political expression. Here the neighbourhood represents an on-going project of creating, transforming and improving spaces, relationships and activities among multiple communities which inhabit it, a forum of confrontations and mutual adaptations and intercultural interactions which affect migrants but also locals. Transnational mobility is a structural date of contemporaneity. Based on this assumption, migration problematizes the traditional concept of neighbourhood and local space. The fieldwork highlights the explosion of the neighbourhood-form in which there is an intricate relationship between place of residence and citizenship, place of family, place of sociality, and often the workplace. Bolognina, Poble Sec and Kypseli, the spaces of our cases studies, have become an urban hub, continuously transformed by mobility – both transnational mobility and the mobility within the city. In contemporary cities, migrants are space invaders, in the double meaning of the concept. On one hand, they are seen as space invaders by a part of the local population; on the other hand, they invade urban and public spaces (institutional and non-institutional, formal and informal, public and private), by re-thinking and re-signifying places that were not originally intended for them. They building new concepts of the public space. Following these trajectories means drawing the maps of an insurgent city. In this sense, our research revel  that  Poble Sec, Bolognina, Kypsel could be think as tranasnational urban spaces. They are places of translation, or creation of new transnational languages and forms of interaction as well as conflicts and redefinition, between local/global, national/transntional, national/foreigners; North/South, West/East... Our research shows the city as a space of hybridization and translation. The two-ness becomes the production of something of new, that is not the simple sum or conflicts of two identities, because both the two sides of the double consciousness are put in question. In fact, in the everyday life of the city these identities are displaced. And the citizenship is more and more detached from a supposed national belonging. Local spaces seem to be the concret place were the experiences of participation and belonging are performed. The interviews with immigrants residing in Barcelona, Bologna, Athens, provide evidence of the important transformation in the composition of the neighbourhood’s population. The practices of migrant women and men reveal changing urban landscapes, which are invested with different gendered meanings and experiences and point to informal mechanisms of integration “from below” along with, and sometimes despite of, institutional practices “from above”. Such mechanisms may be found in the workings of the housing market, in the uses of public spaces, in the renewed neighbourly relations, in the formation of dense support networks, in the ever more prominent presence of migrant businesses and services – all of which involve increasing numbers of locals as well. On one hand, the migrants’ presence have revitalized, rejuvenated and gave a new life to the neighborhood. On the other, the migration problematizes the traditional concept of neighborhood and local space. In cities which have succeeded in reinventing themselves over and over again such as Barcelona, Athens and Bologna neighbourhoods like Poble Sec, Kypseli and Bolognina have discovered in the past decade the value of commercial hospitality and the importance of “ethnic” shops, bars and restaurants as agents for revitalizing an area which was in serious decline. Like in other city districts, migrants have come to occupy an important role in the production of new forms of neighbourhood living. In Poble Sec and Kypseli case studies we can differentiate those urban processes that Saskia Sassen calls a low-cost equivalent of gentrification… Small investments become neighbourhood upgrading because of the residential concentration of immigrants. The interviews with immigrants residing in Poble Sec since the late 1990s provide evidence of the important transformation in the composition of the neighbourhood’s population. These changes refer to the increase in the number of different kinds of shops (greengrocer’s, butcher’s, hairdresser’s, locutorios, bars) managed by immigrants, but they also refer to the growing presence of neighbours of immigrant origin since the beginnings of the 21st century. In Kypseli, the fieldwork findings show three aspects which relate the arrival of the migrant population with the urban transformations: revitalisation of the housing market, intensive use of public transport and restructuring of commercial activity. Migrant presence in Kypseli is very visible in public spaces and in land use transformations. Their shops attract customers through specialised offer, long opening hours, quality service and affordable prices. They also play a stabilising role in the neighbourhood: they make the migrants’ presence more visible, promote different selling/buying habits and usually function as points of reference for various groups and as contact places between migrants and locals. At the same time they are important employment and income generators. In this process migrant women are key actors, both as consumers and as workers, in “family businesses” or in shops of their own. In bouth cases the attitudes of locals remain ambiguous. Some talk about criminality, drugs, mafias and prostitution, about women afraid to move around after dark, about old residents who have left; they use hard, phobic language. Others, however, admit that “the shops work”, “whatever time I call her [the Albanian neighbour] she comes to buy something for me, to do help do something…”, “they respect neighbours”, “they have revitalised the neighbourhood”, “we are also (internal) migrants”. However, in the case of Bolognina there is a proper gentrification process of high standing promoted by the City Council and private enterprises. The Navile district where Bolognina belongs is involved in recent years in many public projects of different nature: from housing to sport venues, transports, green areas, and cultural institutions as libraries. In the context of the economic crisis, many migrants have to move, sometimes in different neighbourhoods. The mobility is not only from a country to another country, but towards a new world identified in most cases with the city. Altogether, a lot of migrants want to live in the urban spaces; and living in the urban spaces, they transform them. Therefore, the question of the crisis is central to understand the recent transformation of the city and the ways in which the migrants live the public spaces. About use public spaces Our fieldwork has revealed a competition and differentiation in the use of the main public spaces of the neighbourhood which are determined by the articulation of the following variables: gender, age, nationality, social class, family situation, legal status, working conditions and religious practice (only to mention those that come up more frequently). This perspective allows us to add complexity to the simplistic dichotomy autochthonous/immigrants and to show the differentiation, hierarchy and inequality regarding the access to public spaces within each of these to big groups, often conceived as homogenous realities. Since the middle of the 1980s, migrants have become more visible in the public spaces of many south european cities, this observation needs to be qualified by gender. Gender is a variable that conditions the forms of circulating the neighbourhood. Different interviewees agreed in pointing out that, in general, women are seen more during the day: in social services, courses, doctors offices, school doors, neighbourhood parties, squares, and very often with their boys and girls. Male presence is dominant in certain bars, in parks, in corners and mainly at night. A first and rather obvious observation is that migrant women use the public spaces of their neighbourhood more intensively, because they perform there a variety of domestic and care activities, which are not usually considered as “real work”, like the daily shopping for the family, escorting the children to kindergartens or schools, taking them to the health centres etc. On the other hand, in the Kypseli case study, migrant women have more opportunities to communicate with local people (mainly women) than men do. They discuss with their employers, their friends, their neighbours, the people who they meet in the shops, the mothers of their children’s friends who they meet in the school or in public spaces like Kypseli square. In Poble Sec, the use of the public space is also affected by ethnic relations. There is an invisibilisation of Pakistani women and a minority presence of Moroccan women carrying out tasks connected to the field of social reproduction. Opposed to this, there is the hiper-visibilisation of Dominican women around hairdressing salons, chatting and well dressed- who escape the roles assigned to migrant women. In Bolognina the use of the public space from a gender perspective is inseparably linked to the idea of independence and freedom for migrant women, something that did not emerge in the other two case studies These public spaces are the sites of face-to-face contact and everyday intermingling and, sometimes, confrontation with locals, as well as with other immigrants. Informal social integration takes place through casual yet repeated contact, over a period of time. It often leads to less casual relations, even to the formation of friendships and networks. Visibility and /co-presence in public spaces contributes to gradually turn the ‘unfamiliar’ into ‘familiar’: for locals, the presence of migrant women and their children in the squares, the supermarkets or the local shops is no more an unusual sight; for migrant women these same places have become part of a daily routine which bears characteristics of coexistence. The intense presence of migrants in urban spaces and their complex everyday tactics and strategies to “settle” in a new and unknown place, raise a number of questions to do with participation and belonging. Such questions point to the need to rethink citizenship and its exclusive connection to the national scale The hegemonic discourse, widely present in the mediatic and political fields, connects migration to insecurity in the public space. This securitarian view of migrations also appears in some of our interviews, as well as diverse forms in which public space, security/insecurity and migration are articulated. An articulation that is also affected by gender relations in origin and destination, by age, by the particular life trajectories. The image of the place of emigration as safer as the place of origin may be already changing, as a consequence of the impact that economic crisis is having on the labour conditions of the immigrant population. The testimonies of the immigrant population as well as those of the key informants who work in social services point to the economic insecurity generated by the crisis and the recession in Spain, Italy and Greece. Conflicts around the use od public space exceed the immigration question and already existed before present immigrants arrived. However, with the increase of the presence of immigrants in the European cities, urban conflicts have come to be considered as problems caused by immigration. The precarious residential conditions under which a high percentage of the immigrant population lives, has led to an intensive use of public spaces, which leads to conflicts and confrontations regarding what is considered to be an inadequate use of the public space. The fact that many people live in the same house is interpreted more as a matter of custom, determined by the culture of origin, that as the product of socio-economic inequalities, the high cost of housing, discrimination and racism (of real estate agencies and of property owners) that are suffered by most immigrants at the moment of renting a place to live. The migration project and the transnational organization of migrant families are also important factors that affect the forms of inhabitation of a house.Relationship between labour and public spaces A constant in all the interviews with the immigrant population is this link between migration and labour. That is: all the testimonies explain the migration project as a strategy to get a better job. This “better job” does not always imply better working conditions, but it does provide a higher income and it allows the migrant to improve the life conditions of relatives (children, spouses, parents) who live in the country of origin through the sending of remittances. The labor market, especially with the current economic crisis, constitutes the first concern for migrants in the three countries. Labour, cause of migration in all discourses, somehow works as a legitimising element for an anomalous ilegitimate situation in the eyes of national logic: the immigrant presence. In all the case studies one point is immediately evident: the relation between labor and public spaces changes completely depending on labor and legal conditions and, particularly for women, on the fact of having a job or not. When we consider the relation between labor and the use of public spaces we need to take into account different dimensions of labor. Labor shapes the relationships between migrants and public spaces but the informality of many labor relations leave migrants the opportunity to build complex networks of relations and movements inside the city that exceed simple labor relations. On the other hand, labor plays a key role in the definition of social relations for migrants. This aspect is involved in all social relations while also having an impact on gender relations. Although the Italian study found that, for women, having a job means autonomy, or at least the definition a proper space of independence from the will and the power of males, in the Spanish study this link between work and women autonomy is not that clear. The articulations between women, work, migration and empowerment/autonomy need more in depth comparative research. In terms of the labour trajectories in the migration, certain differences regarding gender can be established on the basis of the testimonies. Men tend to work or have worked in construction and in service (waiters, cooks, supermarket cashiers, employees at a locutorio). In the case of women, for most of them (and/or for their mothers) domestic/care work has been the first job they have had in Spain, Italy or Greek. Spaces of socialization, working place and residence are related in complicated way. In our case studies many of the women interviewed use public spaces as part of their domestic-work dynamics (market, parks, schools). For future studies, one of the main questions when thinking about the relationships between labor and public spaces could be thus formulated: how is the history of a neighborhood, so historically characterized by a strict correlation between the productive structure and his social composition, reflected in the ordinary experience of migrants that now cross its public spaces? A second important question is: how does the migrant experience tell us something about the way in which this spatial and social static composition has changed over the last years?About social movements In regard to social movements, It is the difficult to elaborate some general conclutions, because the different context in wich the field works were implemented. In the South of Europe, social policies aimed at the immigrant population were displayed by NGO. The Poble Sec studies have confirmed this tendencie: important labour carried out by immigrants, women and neighbours associations in the management of programmes promoted and funded by the municipal government. Also the Church covers an outstanding role in the assistance of the most vulnerable immigrant population in Poble Sec, especially the undocumented and unemployed, and also works in connection with the neighbourhood’s social services. In the Greek case study, people who are in solidarity to migrants try to “cover” the gaps of the Greek migration policies. One interesting such activity is the “School”, i.e. courses of Greek language offered to migrants for free, by volunteer teachers, most of the whom  were involved in Left politics before taking part in the Agora squat. Similar schools exist nowadays in many different neighbourhoods in Athens and Piraeus. In the Italian Study, almost all the interviewees complain about the absence of public policies dedicated to the city’s growing migrant presence. The main issue at stake is the absence of public spaces able to respond to this demographically shifting situation. Almost all the interviewees expect something from the municipality or the neighbourhood: a common grievance is that they live in the city, but the city doesn’t give them places to meet or organize their activities. In Poble Sec, women are the target of most activities of social organisations because they are considered to be in greater need of support. The purpose of these interventions is to promote their participation, emancipation, education, instruction, and to debate topics that should be of their interest. This indicate the importance of representations of gender and immigration in the design, management and assessment of the urban “integration” and “participation” policies and programmes. The insistence in promoting the participation is linked to the hegemonic perception of integration as a matter of commitment and will. Somehow, this idealised participation would show the interest of the immigrant person on belonging to the society in which he or she lives. In the three case study there are implicit and explicit connections between cohesion and diversity; diversity is a threat for cohesion and hence it must be managed. This idea is strongly linked to the paradigm of the Nation State, which imagines culturally homogenous societies and therefore perceives all “difference” as a threat to national integrity (or cohesion). In the Italian study, as well as in the Spanish case, integration and cultural difference seem to be relevant terms in the way in which institutions and people (included migrants) think about migration. In the institutional discourse, managing diversity after the arrival of immigrants translates into the issue of coexistence that emphasises much more the cultural differences than the socio-economic inequalities. In the testimonies of our interviewees, the “cultural” matter and the difficulties to understand and communicate with those defined as different are emphasised. The weight of conflict thus fall mainly on the extra-communitarian immigrant population, though not in the same degree on all nationalities present in the neighbourhood. About transnational practices and belongings Our research proof the neccesity of a transnational perspective in migration studies. The empirical results of this research allow us to confirm transnational practices and the consequent consolidation of social transnational fields does not necessarily interfere with the feeling of belonging to the places of settlement. Besides, the already introduced concept of positionality enables us to understand how the immigrant population creates meaning, ascribes to values and practices citizenship rights according to gender, social class, time of arrival, legal status, education level and the different migration strategies and trajectories. The diverse transnational practices that appear in the Poble Sec case study reflect the variety of migration projects of interviewed persons. Discourses of those who are in a stage of consolidation of their migration project –regularization of legal status, capitalization, family reunification, investments in destination- show a stronger belonging to the neighbourhood, as well as the need to get involved in associations that may improve their commercial activities in Poble Sec. At the same time, they are involved in transnational practices and in family debates around definite settling and return. The empirical results of Kypseli study are centred on the construction of belonging to the neighbourhood and to the city, and on the formation and consolidation of migratory networks. Almost none of our interviewees have moved from Kypseli since the time of their initial settlement. The migrants who live there for shorter or longer periods of time may have changed houses/flats several times, but always within the neighbourhood itself. The goal of the Bolognina study was to outline a topography of the presence, and not absence: if it is true, as states for example A. Sayad (1999), that a sense of displacement is created, it also true that both here and there migrants operates a redefinition of their presence. Productivity of approaching migrants as residents of the place, since it allows us to analyse their role as creators of scale without resorting to preconceived ideas about how their relations with the place are determined by nationality or origin. Illegality is always a possible condition in migrant life. Certainly, for many illegal migrants the specter of deportation is always present but the heterogeneity of the experiences show that more than being a question of legality or illegality, the law acts as a placement agent of migrants inside the society. Inside this scheme that has been called of differential inclusion, illegality is just one position among others. These complex situation brings many to build a presence that is not separated, but is in some way autonomous from the public discourse: their sense of belonging to the city or neighbourhood is thus different from the “nationals”, but like a network with many nodes, often overlaps with them in specific points. Different perceptions of belongings bring to different imagination about the social and political role migrants can play here. Based on the results of the present study, we recommend the corresponding authorities at the different levels of government to implement the necessary policies in order to: Facilitate the real exercise of a Civic Citizenship which guarantees the social, economical, political and cultural rights of all the residents in the EU, without any discrimination on the grounds of gender, age, ethnic group, social class, sexual orientation, religion or nationality. Homogenize the criteria for the participation of non-EU migrants  in local, regional, state and communitarian elections in all the communitarian countries. Guarantee the right to family living to non-EU immigrants, without restrictions of age, nationality, gender, sexual orientation or economic income. Guarantee the right to education to all minors under the age of 18, regardless of their legal status. A legislation that ought to resolve the problems of undocumented migrant workers. This is very important especially for female migrant workers who usually work in informal sector (mainly as carers or domestic workers) and they have to face a lot of problems, such as health risks and the risk of separation of their families, although they have a significant role in the economy of the county of reception. Regularization of domestic work. The need for public policies for altering negative social representations related with stereotypes associating the individual to her/his ethnic/cultural/national group instead of apprehending her/him as an individual (e.g. stereotypes of different ethnic groups as ‘flexible’ and cheaper labour). These policies could include the setting up of effective monitoring and combating discrimination at all levels: from work and employment, for education (including courses of language of the country of reception), social welfare and public life, law and juridical system. Also policy needs to be properly informed about the whole social experience and social position of male and female migrants. The need for policies that enhance self-organisation as well as full participation in all mainstream institutions. This is very important for the realization of integration of female (and male) migrants (and their families). The need to improve the opportunities for female migrants to pursue their labour market aspirations. This includes an increased recognition of skills and qualifications; providing increased access to forms of training and work-practice; helping women enter the labour market; and more comprehensively addressing questions of ethnic and gender discrimination. The need for an evaluation of the gender effects of general policies, including welfare and labour market policies, and specific policies, including those concerning migration and integration. Create and promote social services that allow migrant women and men to ensure a care network for their sons and daughters reunified at destination. Guarantee the effective exercise of the freedom of religion. Create public spaces (squares, playgrounds, sports, etc.), where immigrants and the ‘native’ population can have free access (no need to pay); such places could be the meeting-places where processes of mutual (material emotional etc) help, among migrants who have the same origins, among migrants of different nationalities and among natives and migrants start developing. In this sense they contribute to the effective integration of migrants and reduce (if not eliminate) the xenophobia of the locals. Strengthen the initiatives of local residents, both migrants and 'natives', in order to set up and operate spaces of cultural and other activities which bring together different people at the local/neighbourhood level.   Implement a migrant-sensitive housing policy, including social housing, access to loans with favorable terms, and temporary shelters for people in transit, seeking to move to another country. Local level Offer a greater flexibility in the opening hours of the Healthcare Centers in order to let the service adjust to workdays, especially those of migrant people. Create and promote social services that allow migrant women to ensure a care network for their sons and daughters reunified at destination. Guarantee the right to the effective exercise of the freedom of religion by facilitating the creation of spaces where the different religious groups can gather and pray. Organize a system to manage the renting of apartments or houses which guarantees migrant families' access to housing avoiding situations of discrimination.   Promote a policy of public subsidies for rents aimed at low-income families and individuals (retired, young, immigrant people) in order to avoid processes of gentrification in certain areas of the city and of degradation and overcrowding in others. Create meeting places and playgrounds for the children and young people of the neighborhood. Take advantage of the associative networks already existing in the neighborhood to establish stronger bonds between the autochthonous and immigrant population. Re-think the image of the resident in the new urban spaces: based on the data, statistics, and interviews it’s evident that the migrants are not outsiders, but on the contrary the new citizens. The interviews highlight a high level of desire of the city and urban spaces of the migrants. Preserve the cultural diversity: the multicultural composition has to be reflected by the activities in the city. Avoid the horizontal clashes among the population, and the competition among poor. The institutions have to encourage and promote, encourage, and enhance the paths of composition of diversities, and to contrast the reduction of the migrants to a problem of security and public order. Invest in the renovations of urban spaces that in public rhetoric are labelled as “difficult” or “unsafe”, and are abandoned by the public administration. This is the result of the misunderstanding about the image of resident, and it produces real problems and competition among different kinds of population. Therefore, it is important to fund the spaces (park, squares, courts, social centers, etc.) that are places of aggregation, and new models of intercultural and transnational city. Abélès, M. (2008), "Pensar el desplazamiento de lo público. De la convivencia a la supervivencia" (“Thinking the Displacement of the Public Sphere. From coexistence to survival”), in Política de la supervivencia (Politics of Survival). EUDEBA: Buenos Aires, pp. 95-139. Agrela, B (2006), “La figura ‘mujer inmigrante’ en las políticas de acción social: De los discursos a las prácticas y los modos de intervención” (“The Figure of the ‘Woman Immigrant’ in Social Action Policies: From Discourses to Practices and Modes of Intervention”). In: VV.AA. Mujeres migrantes: viajeras incansables (Women Migrants: Indefatigable Travelers), 75-94 (Bilbao: Harresiak Apurtuz –Diputación Foral de Bizkaia) Agrela, B. y Dietz, G. (2005), "Emergencia de regímenes multinivel y diversificación púbico-privada de la política de inmigración en España" (“Emergence of Multi-level Regimes and Public-Private Diversification of Immigration Policies in Spain”), Migración y Desarrollo, (primer semestre) 4, pp. 20-41. Anderson, B. (1983), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London-New York: Verso. Antonelli, F. and Scadurra, G. (2008), “Pugili di quartiere. Etnografia di una palestra di boxe” (“Boxers of the neihgborhood. Ethnography of a boxing gym”), Etnografia e ricerca qualitativa, n. 3, pp. 435-450. Aramburu Otazu, M (2008) “The myth of the native ‘escape’. The case of Ciutat Vella, Barcelona”,(“El mito de la “huida” autóctona. El caso de Ciutat Vella, Barcelona”). Aramburu Otazu, M. (2009), “Convivència intercultural a l’espai públic urbà” (“Intercultural Coexistence in the Urban Public Space”), Barcelona societat. Revista del coneixement i análisis social, Nº 16, pp. 62-70. Bauman, Z. (2000), Trabajo, consumismo y nuevos pobres (Labour, Consumerism and the New Poor), Barcelona: Gedisa. Baylina, M (1997) “Metodología cualitativa y estudios de geografía y género”, Documents d’Anàlisi Geogràfica, 30: 123-138 Bettio, F, Simonazzi, A, Villa, P (2006) “Change in care regimes and female migration: the ‘care drain’ in the Mediterranean”, Journal of European Social Policy, 16 (3): 271-285. Bommes, M. y Geddes, A. (2000), "Introduction: Immigration and the welfare state", Bommes, Michael y Geddes, Andrew (eds.) Immigration and welfare challengings. The borders of the welfare state, Londres: Routledge,  pp. 1-12. Borja, J and Muxí, Z (2001) Public space: city and citizenship, (Espai públic: ciutat i ciutadania), Barcelona: Diputació de Barcelona. Castel, R. (1997), La metamorfosis de la cuestión social. Una crónica del asalariado (The Metamorphosis of the Social Question. A Chronicle of the Salaried Worker), Barcelona:  Paidós. Coutras, J. (1996) Crise urbain et espaces sexués. Armand Colin, París. Delgado, M (2007) “Brand and territory. On the hypervisibility of immigrants in urban public spaces”, (“Marca y territorio. Sobre la hipervisibilidad de los inmigrantes en espacios públicos urbanos”), V Congreso sobre la inmigración en España. Migraciones y desarrollo humano. (www.adeit.uv.es/inmigracion2007). Delgado, M. (1999) El animal público. Hacia una antropología de los espacios urbanos. (The public animal. Towards an anthropology of urban spaces) Barcelona: Anagrama Dietz, G. (2000), El desafío de la interculturalidad. El voluntariado y las ONG ante el reto de la inmigración. El caso de la ciudad de Granada (The Challenge of Interculturality. How Volunteer Work and NGOs Face Immigration. The Case of the City of Granada), Granada: Laboratorio de Estudios Interculturales. Facultad de Ciencias de la Educación de la Universidad de Granada. Du Bois, W.E.B. (1903), The Souls of Black Folks, in Sundquist, E.J. (ed.) (1996), The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, New York - Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 97-240. Dyck, I., McLaren, A.T. 2004, “Telling it like it is… Gender, place and multiculturalism in migrant women’s settlement narratives”, Gender, Place and Culture, 11:4, pp. 173-185 Fenster, T (2004) The global city and the holy city. Narratives on knowledge, planning and diversity, Essex: Prentice Hall Francis, M (1989) “Control as a dimension of public-space quality”, Altman, I and Zube, E H(eds) Public Places & Spaces, New York: Plenum Press, 121-146. García Ballesteros, Aurora .1989. “¿Espacio masculino, espacio femenino? Notas para una aproximación geográfica al estudio del uso del espacio en la vida cotidiana”, ("Space male, female space? Notes for a geographic approach to study of the use of space in the life everyday ") In Aurora García Ballesteros (ed.), El uso del espacio público de la vida cotidiana. (The use of public space daily life). Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid,  pp. 13-27. Gil Araujo, S. (2010), Las argucias del a integración. Políticas migratorias, construcción nacional y cuestión social, (The Tricks of Integration. Migration Policies, Nation-Building and Social Question), Madrid: IEPALA. Gilroy, P. (1993), The Black Atlantic: modernity and double consciousness, London-New York: Verso. Giménez Romero, C. (1995), “Inmigración e interculturalidad en Madrid. Apuntes para un balance social” (“Immigration and Interculturality in Madrid: Notes for Social Balance”), Economía y Sociedad, Nº 12, pp. 171-202. Guzmán, R (2007) “Gender, immigration and citizenship. Equatorian women’s presence in Seville” (“Género, inmigración y ciudadanía. Presencia de las mujeres ecuatorianas en Sevilla”), V Congreso sobre la inmigración en España. Migraciones y desarrollo humano. (www.adeit.uv.es/inmigracion2007). Justo, Aurora. 2000. “La planificación urbana desde la perspectiva de género. Por un derecho a la ciudad igualitaria”, ("Urban planning from the perspective of gender. For an equal right to the city") In Seminario: Ciudad posible, ciudad deseable: la planificación urbana en un mundo cambiante. (Seminar: City may, citydesirable: an urban planning changing world) Universidad Internacional King, R., Lazaridis, G., Tsardanidis, C. (eds) 2000, Eldorado or Fortress? Migration in Southern Europe, London: Macmillan Leitner, H and Ehrkamp, P. (2006), “Transnationalism and migrants’ imagining of citizenship”. Environment and Planning A. Vol. 38, p. 1615-1632. López de Lucio, R (2000) “Public space in the European city: between the crisis and the initiatives of retrieval. Implications for Latin America” (“El espacio público en la ciudad europea: entre la crisis y las iniciativas de recuperación. Implicaciones para Latinoamérica”), Revista de Occidente, Nº230/231, julio-agosto 2000: 105-121. Low, S (2001) On the Plaza. The politics of public space and culture, Austin: University of Texas Press. Macioti, M.I., Pugliese, E. 1991, Gli immigrati in Italia, Bari: Laterza Madge, C et al. (1997) “Methods and methodologies in feminist geographies: politics, practice and power” in WGSG, Feminist Geographies. Explorations in diversity and difference, London: Longman, pp. 86-111 Maloutas, Th., Karadimitriou, N. 2001, “Vertical social differentiation in Athens: Alternative or complement ot community segregation?, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25:4, pp.449-465 Martínez, U. (1997), “El lugar estable y móvil de los inmigrantes, las paradojas de su vivienda en las ciudades” (“The Stable and Mobile Place of Immigrtants. Paradoxes of their Dwelling in the Cities”), en Delgado, M. (comp.), Ciutat i inmigració (City and Immigration). Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. Massey, D., 1994, Space, Place and Gender, Oxford: Polity McDowell, Linda. 1999. Género, identidad y lugar. Un estudio de las geografías feministas. (Gender, identity and place. A study of feminist geographies) Madrid: Cátedra. Mezzadra, S. (2008), La condizione postcoloniale. Storia e politica nel presente globale, Verona: ombre corte. Miller, D. (2000), Citizenship and National Identity, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Monet, M. (2002), La formación del espacio público. Una mirada etnológica sobre el Casc Antic de Barcelona (The Formation of the Public Space. An Ethnological Approach to the Casc Antic of Barcelona), Madrid: Libros de la Catarata. Moraes, N (2006) “The transnacional perspective on the study of migrations and the academy debate in Spain” (“La perspectiva transnacional en el estudio de las migraciones y el debate académico en España: A propósito del X Congreso de Inmigración de Almería”. Biblio 3W. Revista bibliográfica de Geografía y ciencias sociales (serie documental de Geo Crítica), XI, 667. (http://www.ub.es/geocrit/b3w-667.htm). Ortiz, A (2003) “Gender, public spaces and the building of sense of belonging in Barcelona (neighbourhoods of Prosperitat, Verdum and Raval)” (“Gènere, espais públics i construcció del sentit de pertinença a Barcelona (els barris de Prosperitat, el Verdum i el Raval)”). Tesis doctoral.  Departament de Geografia. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Ortiz, A (2004) “Use and appropiation of Via Júlia and Rambla del Raval of Barcelona from a gender perspectiva” (“Ús i apropiación de la Via Júlia i la Rambla del Raval de Barcelona des d’una perspectiva de gènere”), Documents d’Anàlisi Geogràfica, 44:  89-108 Pedone, C (2004) You always Stick with Your Own (‬Tú siempre jalas a los tuyos)‪, Bellaterra: Universitat Autónoma (Doctoral Thesis). Pedone, C. (2010), “‘Lo de migrar me lo pensaría con calma’: representaciones sociales de jóvenes en torno al proyecto migratorio familiar” (“‘I Would Give Some Calm Thought to that Idea of Migrating’: Social Representations of Young People regarding the Family Migration Project ”. Pedreño, Andrés et al. (coords.). Tránsitos migratorios. Contextos transnacionales y proyectos familiares en las migraciones actuales (Migration Transits. Transnational Contexts and Family Projects in Current Migrations). Murcia: Universidad de Murcia. Pedone, C. and Gil Araujo, S. (2008), “Maternidades transnacionales entre América Latina y el Estado español. El impacto de las políticas migratorias en las estrategias de reagrupación familiar”, pp. 149-176. (“Transnational Maternities between Latin America and the Spanish State. The Impact of Immigration Policy on Strategies of Family Reunification”). En: Nuevos retos del transnacionalismo en el estudio de las migraciones. (The New Challenges of Transnationalism for the Study of Immigration) Madrid: OPI-Ministerio de Trabajo e Inmigración. Pedreño Cánovas, A. (2005), "Sociedades etnofragmentadas" (“Ethno-Fragmented Societies”), Pedreño Cánovas, A. y Hernández Pedreño, M. (coords.), La condición inmigrante. Exploraciones e investigaciones desde la Región de Murcia (The Immigrant Condition. Explorations and Researches from the Region of Murcia), Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, pp. 75-103. Prats, M (1998) “Feminist geography and methodology: reflection on a parallel learning procdess” (“Geografia feminista i metodologia: reflexió sobre un procés d’aprenentatge paral.lel”), Cuadernos de Geografia, 64: 313-323 Puwar, N. (2003), “Parole situate e politica globale”, DeriveApprodi, n. 23, pp. 13-19. Puwar, N. (2004), Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place, Oxford: Berg. Rose, G (2001) Visual methodologies. An introduction to the interpretation of visual materials, London: Sage. Sakai, N. and Solomon, J. (2006), “Introduction: Addressing the Multitude of Foreigners, Echoing Foucault, in Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Discourse, Traces, n. 4, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Sassen, S (2003), “Reubicar la ciudadanía. Posibilidades emergentes en la nueva geografía política” (87-113). En Sassen, Saskia, Contrageografías de la globalización. Género y ciudadanía en los circuitos transfronterizos (Countergeographies of Globalization. Gender and Citizenship in Crossborder Circuits). Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. Sassen, S. (1991) The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sayad, Abdelmalek (1999), La Double absence. Des illusions de l'émigré aux souffrances de l'immigré, Paris: Editions du Seuil. Soysal, Y. N. (1994), Limits of Citizenships. Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Suárez, L (2007) “Transnational perspective in migration studies. Genesis, courses and methodological tracks” (“La perspectiva transnacional en los estudios migratorios. Génesis, derroteros, y surcos metodológicos”) ”, V Congreso sobre la inmigración en España. Migraciones y desarrollo humano. (www.adeit.uv.es/inmigracion2007). Tambini, D. (2001), “Post-national citizenship'', in Ethnic and Racial Studies 24, pp 195 -217. Tastsoglou, Ε., Hadjicostandi, J. 2003, “Never outside the labour market, but always outsiders: Female migrant workers in Greece”, Special Issue: Gender and International Migration: Focus on Greece (E. Tastsoglou & L. Maratou-Alipranti eds), The Greek Review of Social Research, 110A, pp.189-220. Torres, F (2004) “Public spaces, sociability and immigrant inclusión. The case of two parks in Valencia” (“Espacios públicos, sociabilidad e inserción de los inmigrantes. El caso de dos parques en Valencia”), 4º Congreso sobre la inmigración en España, Girona 10-13 de noviembre de 2004. Vega Solis, Cristina y Gil Araujo, Sandra (2003) "Introducción. Contrageografías: circuitos alternativos para una ciudadanía global" (“Introduction, Countergeographies: Alternative Circuits for a Global Citizenship”) (11-26). En Sassen, S. Contrageografías de la globalización. Género y ciudadanía en los circuitos transfronterizos (Countergeographies of Globalization. Gender and Citizenship in Crossborder Circuits) Madrid: Traficantes de sueños. Walzer, M (1986) “Pleasures & Costs of Urbanity”, Dissent, 33(4): 470-475. Whyte, WH (1980) The social life of small urban spaces, New York: Project for Public Spaces. Wiles, JL, Rosenberg, MW, Kearns, RA (2005) “Narrative analysis as a strategy for understanding interview talk in geographic research”, Area, 37 (1): 89-99 Young, L, Barret, H (2001) “Adapting visual methods: action research with Kampala street children”, Area, 33 (2): 141-152.   Name of interviewee (please note that all names will be changed): Age of person interviewed: Sex of person interviewed: Date of interview: - History of the migrant family Country and city of origin; life before migration; motivation to emigrate and migration process; people living with her/him here; difficulties for her/him to settle here. - Legal, labour, education and family situation Current legal status; access to nationality; job (what, how was obtained, difficulty to obtain for a man/woman or not, conditions, comparison with job in place of origin, future); income management; educational level of origin and other courses/studies carried out here. Negotiations in gender and generational relationships: responsibility on domestic and family occupations; reunification process (any family member joined, how); type of lifestyle here (including way of bringing up children). - Use of public spaces in the city and in the neighbourhood. About the neighbourhood (election, satisfaction, places used –why and with whom-, places for relax, places that avoid –why-, where your children/young people go -boys/girls-; facilities/services used in the neighbourhood and level of satisfaction (for him/her, children, young people, women, elderly). About the city: other neighbourhoods visited (which, why). Use of free time. Differences between public life here and in place of origin. - Participation in associations, schools, etc. Membership of any association (which, why, with whom, relationships there, satisfaction, gaps founded); participation in parents-teachers associations; experiences as students. - Transnational practices and the use of public spaces Use of call-center (when, person/s of contact, topics of conversation, use as a meeting point); remittances management; investments in housing/businesses; social remittances (transnational motherhood);satisfaction of living in Barcelona, Athens, Bologna; main problems faced here; ideas about return; plans for the future; children’s plans for the future and your opinion on them. d) Interviews with natives, key informants, experts and politics leaders. e) ‘Observation guidelines’ (for the different types of locations) f)  Focus group, especially with the social movements in the neighbourhoods g) Compilation of statistics and official documents. The fieldwork was conducted in three neighbourhoods (Kypseli in Athens, Bolognina in Bologna and Poble Sec in Barcelona) between January 2009 and February 2010. The case studies used different qualitative methods, including: a) 90 in-depth interviews with migrants, natives, key informants, experts and political leaders; b) mapping of the neighbourhood (uses, activities etc.); c) participant observation (leisure and aggregation spaces organized and attended by migrant women and men, such as markets and shops, urban parks, coffee shops, “ethnic” businesses such as food shops, hairdressers or beauty shops), d) focus group (especially with the social movements in the neighbourhoods) The total amount of interviews, systematic and participant observations were: Bolognina  Bolognina: 25 in-depth interviews of whom: 5 women from Morocco; 2 women from Tunisia; 1 woman from Egypt; 1 woman from Ivory Coast; 1 woman from Iraq; 1 woman from Sri Lanka; 1 woman from Bangladesh; 1 woman from Colombia; 2 woman from Romania; 5 men from Morocco; 1 man from Tunisia; 1 man from Bangladesh; 1 man from Senegal; 2 men from Cameroun 8 key informants: 2 social researchers in Bolognina; 1 member of “Osservatorio Migranti – Comune di Bologna”; 4 members of “Annassim” Association; 2 members of “Coordinamento Migranti Bologna”. Kypseli  Kypseli: 18 sessions of systematic observation in Kypseli square 6 key informants: 3 interviews in Kypseli square (a member of the Philippine community based in Kypseli neighborhood; the owner of the kiosk in Kypseli square; an old inhabitant of the neighborhood and owner of a wine store on the Square). 3 interviews in the Agora (a teacher in the school and resident of Kypseli since she was born; a teacher in the school and resident of Kypseli for many years; a teacher of the school and resident; 3 interviews with migrant and native people from the square (a woman from Bulgaria working in the care sector in a house in Kypseli; a young man Kurd from Syria who lives in Kypseli 4 years; a woman from Greece who lives in Kypseli 25 years). 7 interviews with migrant men and women attending the classes at the Agora. Poble Sec  Poble Sec:  24 in-depth interviews. 18 migrants of whom: 11 migrant women from Dominican Republic, China, Venezuela, Bangladesh, Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina. 7 migrant men from Dominican Republic, Pakistan, Brasil and Argentina   Native population. 2 people who arrived in the neighbourhood around 1950-60 2 immigrants from the second migration wave 2 young people (natives and foreigners) who came to the area because it is central, it has reasonable prices to rent or buy, and they are very taken with the “cultural diversity” of Poble Sec. 13 key informants: 3 members of the business association; the native priest who has been working with migrants since 2000; 2 social workers from Poble-Sec per a Tothom (Poble Sec for Everybody: a social platform formed by individuals and social-cultural associations whose aim is to foster local coexistence); 2 teachers of Spanish and Catalan languages from an NGO and an institutional organization; interviews with members of the Catalan Parliament to find out the different conceptions of diversity, citizenship, the migrant population’s access to political rights and the role of the different levels of government in the construction of immigration policy; interviews with the staff at the Health Centre. 25 in-depth interviews 8 key informants 18 sessions of systematic observation in Kypseli Square 6 key informants (3 in Kypseli Square and 3 at the Agora). 3 interviews w/migrant and native people from the square. 7 interviews at he Agora 6 discussions in the clases 24 in-depth interviews 16 participant observations 13 key informants