Rethinking inclusion, talent and the right to stay: the role of the Urban Agenda for the EU Partnerships
A high quality of life can help sustain urban attractiveness despite population decline by fostering social cohesion, strengthening residents’ sense of belonging, and ensuring equitable access to opportunities. Access to employment, education, housing, transport and essential services plays a decisive role in shaping individuals’ decisions to settle in and remain within a city. Ensuring equitable access to these opportunities across the urban landscape is therefore not only a matter of social inclusion, but also a key factor in strengthening urban resilience, competitiveness and long-term demographic sustainability.
Within this broader framework, attracting and retaining migrant talent and workforce can also contribute to addressing demographic decline, alongside other strategies targeting ageing populations, labour market transformation and territorial cohesion. However, migration alone cannot outweigh these trends unless cities provide inclusive, attractive and opportunity-rich living environments.
The two Urban Agenda Partnerships on Inclusion of Migrants and Refugees and Cities of Equality, are tackling these challenges from different but complementary perspectives.
Promoting equality in a changing urban landscape
For cities facing demographic decline, enhancing quality of life is essential to attracting and retaining residents. The ‘right to stay’ cannot be understood without addressing what staying means for those left behind.
Within this context, the City of Equality Partnership addresses the challenge of assessing spatial segregation and access to services across urban areas. Its scope covers key sectors including employment, education and training, housing, transport, healthcare and social care, as well as culture. The concept of "access to services" encompasses not only the geographical distribution, availability and physical accessibility of services, but also the informational, technological, social and cultural barriers that may prevent individuals from benefiting from them, including issues related to digital accessibility.
Current data frameworks are often unfit to the diversity of European urban contexts, with the specific circumstances of smaller and peripheral cities frequently overlooked. Notably, the Partnership includes members directly affected by demographic decline, such as the Konin metropolitan area in Poland and the Birzai district municipality in Lithuania. Their participation demonstrates that the equality agenda is increasingly extending beyond large and rapidly growing urban centres.
A working paper presented in May 2026 identified seventeen existing approaches to measuring spatial segregation and access to services at local, national and European levels. The analysis found that income represents the most significant driver of residential segregation in Europe, surpassing factors such as ethnic background or age. At the same time, it revealed important gaps in current monitoring practices. Cities in Eastern Europe and smaller urban areas remain under-represented, while initiatives addressing gender-based inequalities and digital accessibility are comparatively rare. These shortcomings are particularly concerning because such territories are often among those most vulnerable to demographic decline. The working paper also found that measurement systems used for policy purposes tend to rely on proxy concepts (most notably urban vulnerability and neighbourhood deprivation) rather than measuring segregation directly, and that a stronger link between measurement tools and policy processes is essential: data must be understood and used by policymakers from the outset, rather than produced as a standalone analytical product. The working paper is expected to be published in June 2026.
The case of Pla de Barris in Barcelona
The case of Pla de Barris in Barcelona is an inspiring example of how to develop a data framework for measuring segregation and accessibility. Launched in 2016 by Barcelona City Council and targeting the city's most deprived neighbourhoods, the programme relies on the Urban Vulnerability Index (IVU) developed by Institut Metròpoli, a composite measure combining social vulnerability indicators (including low-income concentration, elderly isolation, and the share of foreign-origin population from low-income countries) with residential vulnerability indicators such as housing quality and population density.
Between 2015 and 2020, the IVU recorded a modest but consistent reduction in vulnerability intensity across most Pla de Barris areas, driven primarily by improved household incomes and reduced early school leaving, while also confirming the structural persistence of neighbourhood hierarchies and the limited capacity of area-based interventions alone to reverse deep-rooted inequalities.
The Pla de Barris approach offers a replicable model of data-informed, policy-linked measurement, and the Cities of Equality Partnership is now using it as a pilot case study to inform the design of its own analytical framework.
However, understanding inequalities is only the first step. The Partnership's remaining actions focus on the mechanisms that can either reinforce or mitigate disparities: EU funding instruments (Action 2 aims to directly integrate equality criteria into the design of results-based funding) and participatory governance (Action 3 gathers and shares innovative practices for inclusive citizen engagement).
Attracting and retaining migrant talent and workforce
A key challenge for shrinking cities and regions lies in their difficulty in attracting and retaining talent. Demographic decline reduces both the supply and demand conditions that underpin dynamic and attractive labour markets.
Population ageing and outmigration lead to fewer working-age residents, creating immediate labour shortages. At the same time, these areas often experience weaker economic activity, fewer job opportunities, and lower wage levels compared to larger urban centres, further limiting their attractiveness to skilled workers.
As part of broader efforts to attract and retain talent, cities and regions facing demographic decline increasingly rely on attracting migrant talent as one important policy lever. However, successful attraction must be matched with effective integration policies that enable migrants to fully participate in local labour markets and communities.
The Inclusion of Migrants and Refugees Partnership has played a central role in this regard, focusing on the integration of migrant talent into the European labour market as well as inclusive education from early childhood to higher education. Its action “Inclusive Integration into Quality Jobs” highlights the importance of improving employment opportunities and recognising skills to fully harness the potential of migrant communities, particularly migrant women, and to support their inclusion, autonomy, and well-being.
In 2025, the Partnership facilitated two exchanges of good practices on the early labour market integration of migrants and refugees. These sessions showcased initiatives from Malta, Italy, Amsterdam, the Basque Country, Flanders, and Germany, highlighting diverse approaches to improving access to employment.
A particularly notable example is the Basque Government’s “Trapezistak” programme, recognised by the European Committee of the Regions as one of ten success stories in the European Union’s 2024 Annual Report on the State of Regions and Cities, specifically in the field of demographic challenges. “Trapezistak” (Basque for “tightrope walkers”) is a programme designed to support the inclusion and transition to adulthood of young people, mainly migrants, without family support networks in the Basque Autonomous Community (Euskadi).
The programme recognises emancipation as a gradual, multidimensional process shaped by access to employment, housing, income, skills, and cultural and social integration, rather than a single outcome. It provides a “one-stop shop” model combining services in a coordinated, community-based system, with strong public leadership and inter-institutional cooperation. The approach promotes autonomous living while ensuring positive action for groups facing structural disadvantages, such as migrants or women.
Another notable national-level initiative is the Job-Turbo, led by the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (BMAS) in Germany. The programme aims to integrate refugees into the labour market at an early stage and to support their long-term employment once they have acquired basic German language skills. It focuses on facilitating direct job placement immediately after the successful completion of integration courses.
The integration process is generally structured around a three-phase model:
- Phase 1: Orientation and acquisition of basic German language skills
- Phase 2: Employment entry and vocational qualification
- Phase 3: Stabilisation and expansion of employment
The initiative has supported many refugees, including around 200,000 Ukrainians who have either completed or are expected to complete integration courses and possess basic German language skills. The aim of Job-Turbo is to leverage this potential and facilitate rapid entry into employment.
The right to stay starts with access
Together, these examples and actions from the two UAEU Partnerships demonstrate that the right to remain is inseparable from the right to an equitable city for all residents. Attracting migrants can help address key gaps in shrinking cities by filling labour market needs, sustaining local businesses, and stabilising population decline. However, this only works sustainably if newcomers are not treated as a separate policy category but are integrated into existing systems.
The key link is universal service provision: investments in housing, healthcare, education, transport, and administrative services should be designed to serve both long-term residents and newcomers equally.