UNIC Lightning Bites | ICONIC project

Within the framework of UNIC Lightning Bites series focused on Superdiversity Unpacked: Insights for Tomorrow's Cities we explore how superdiversity shapes cities and citizens, fostering new forms of urban innovation, social cohesion, and cultural transformation.

Professor Mark van Ostaijen (from the Erasmus University Rotterdam) talks about his granted research, Project Iconic (https://project-iconic.eu/). For this international comparative research, he focusses, with a team of PhDs, on the decision-making of ‘street-level workers’. More specifically he zooms in on how they legitimate decisions in superdiverse European neighbourhoods of Malmö, Aarhus, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Marseille and Bilbao.

In this session, Mark reflects on the UNIC character of this project, how the project currently started and what can be expected in the nearby future. This makes this project the first major comparative study on the institutional consequences of superdiversity, which will ultimately provide insights into how urban diversity becomes translated into policy practices.