As migration keeps shaping urban societies, the ways in which cities deal with increasing heterogeneity has become a salient issue. Focusing on the realm of urban immigrant policy-making, this talk starts from the need to capture new ideas in conjunction with new coalitions that emerged between local authorities and civil society organizations in the governance of migration-related diversity. Drawing on governance literature, urban regime theory and various research on immigrant policy-making, Maria Schiller conceives of “urban diversity regimes” as coalitions between governmental and non-governmental actors working on and involved in diversity policies. Such urban diversity regimes involve repeated and institutionalized interaction (collaborative or conflictual) over time as well as the negotiation of different conceptions of diversity and unequal power between actors. Analysing urban immigrant regimes can help to further specify how a governance turn, a diversity turn and a local turn combine and manifest in practice. The author will use the city Mannheim as an example, a city that heavily invested in the build-up of an urban diversity alliance in the governance of migration-related diversity, to illustrate potential insights from state and non-state actors collaborations around the notion of diversity.

Maria Schiller is an Assistant Professor of Public policy, Migration and Diversity at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her work is motivated by the desire to understand and capture the dynamics of migration and diversity, with a particular focus on Europe. In her research she investigates policy implementation, street-level bureaucracy and governance networks, and she often takes a comparative approach. Previously, she was a Senior Resarch Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, a Substitute Assistant Professor at the University of Tübingen, a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Kent and a Marie Skoldowska Curie Fellow at the University of Vienna. She holds a PhD in Migration Studies (2014) from the University of Kent.