The research group GRITIM-UPF, linked to the Department of Political and Social Sciences, is participating in the project. "BROAD-ER: Bridging the Migration and Urban Studies Nexus" aims to construct an international network of excellence in research to develop interdisciplinary research and education, at the point where migration and urban studies converge.

GRITIM-UPF, together with the University of Amsterdam (UvA), make up the two European centres of excellence that will assist the Migration Research Center (MiReKoc) at Koç University (KU) in Istanbul in developing its research capacities and links with Europe. The three universities will collaborate and complement one another accordingly, thanks to their respective knowledge and skills.

Ricard Zapata-Barrero: "Our team will collaborate in promoting research in the relations between the national (state) and local scales, and in promoting the new tendencies of cities to increase their autonomy and activism in the field of migrations”.

The BROAD-ER project (ID 101079254) started in November 2022 will last for three years. It has a budget of 1.4 million euros (350,000 of which will go to UPF) and is part of the European Commission's Twinning Action Fund, within the Horizon Europe programme (awarded under the call HORIZON-WIDERA-2021).

Ricard Zapata Barrero is UPF's senior researcher in the project, professor of UPF's Department of Political and Social Sciences, director of GRITIM-UPF and the Master in Migration Studies. Together with Rafik Arfaou, postdoctoral researcher, and Diletta Marcucci, doctoral student, which have selected by the three universities through an international call, they make up the Spanish BROAD-ER Team.

The senior researchers from the other two institutions are Ahmet Içduygu, MiReKoc director and general coordinator of the project, and Jan Rath, professor of the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam.

What will GRITIM-UPF bring to the project?

The fact that GRITIM-UPF is part of the BROAD-ER project, as one of the two European centers of excellence, already tells us the pre-eminent place we occupy in Europe in terms of research", says Ricard Zapata Barrero. The main researcher of the project at the UPF explains that "our team will collaborate in promoting research in the relations between the national (state) and local scales, and in promoting the new tendencies of cities to increase their autonomy and activism in the field of migrations”.

In fact, according to Ricard Zapata Barrero, "this theorizing with an empirical basis enters into the debate that we have been promoting for a few years, which we call the local turn, and which is having a great impact, in which we explore the new dynamics of cities and we put states under pressure in terms of migration decisions. Thus, cities adopt a new role: they are more pro-active and even activists, they create unprecedented networks, they innovate politically to accommodate a fairer treatment of immigrants, with new narratives and many times in direct conflict with the position official of their states".

The contributions of the other two participating institutions will focus on the external dimensions of cities or city diplomacy (MiReKoc-Koç University) and the link between cities and civil society entities (University of Amsterdam). Together, these three pillars of BROAD-ER reflect the three new trends in cities, which Ricard Zapata Barrero has included in the international debate, with their application to the Mediterranean area.

"These three new city patterns are what inspired BROAD-ER, and what we have done is a division of tasks between the three institutions to energize this debate, linking migration studies and urban studies. I matured all this during my stay at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), where I spent seven months last year as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar. Now is the time to work in coordination with other universities", affirms the director of GRITIM-UPF.

What does the project aim to do and what type of activities will be involved?

BROAD-ER hopes that Koç University will become an important centre of research excellence in the south-east of Europe and that this will improve its collaboration with other countries in the European Research Area (ERA).

The collaboration between the three universities aims to close the research gap within the European Research Area by applying innovative and interdisciplinary approaches, as well as increasing the research and innovation capacities in Turkey, in crucial emerging fields such as migration and urban studies.

To achieve these objectives, the project will offer scientific training activities and research management for researchers, including managing research proposals, scientific dissemination, entrepreneurship, knowledge transfer, etc., as well as striving for excellence in research within the project's own fields.

The training activities will be complemented by mobility activities, in order to build networking structures. As such, the project will give rise to many joint publications in leading journals, a greater capacity to attract research funding and funding for implementing projects, and an open and transparent hiring process that has been updated by the researchers. "We already have summer schools scheduled in Turkey to attract international PhD students, and a series of panels and workshops in international research forums, to also promote research with Turkey", concludes Ricard Zapata Barrero.