What are the challenges facing cities when it comes to immigration? What kind of numbers of new immigrants are we likely to see in cities in the future? What impact will this have on identity, belonging and citizenship? This panel looks at the challenges cities face and how to make change work. Steve Hanson (author of the Foresight Future of Cities paper on identity and belonging) joins Rachel Sylvester (The Times), Abdullahi Farah (Bristol Somali Resource Centre) and Ted Cantle (Institute of Community Cohesion). Chaired by Sunder Katwala (British Future).

In association with British Future.

Speaker biographies:

Ted Cantle established the iCoCo Foundation to build on the work of the Institute of Community Cohesion, which he set up in 2005 to explore community cohesion and intercultural relations. In 2001, he was appointed by the Home Secretary to Chair the Community Cohesion Review Team. The Cantle Report was produced in December 2001 and made around 70 recommendations. He is the author of Community Cohesion: A New Framework for Race and Diversity and Interculturalism: The New Era of Cohesion and Diversity. He is Chair of Sustainability First, and has been a member and Deputy Chairman of the Board of the Environment Agency for England and Wales. He is a visiting professor at Nottingham Trent University and the University of Nottingham.

Abdullahi Farah manages the Bristol Somali Resource Centre, a community-based organisation which supports people who are socially and economically disadvantaged, in particular those of Somali origin and heritage living and/or working within Bristol. Set up in 2006, it is a registered charity and provides free and impartial information, advice and guidance on range of issues including welfare, housing, immigration, schools and employment.

Steve Hanson is a writer and researcher. He has lectured at Goldsmiths, in the Sociology department, and at Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Salford. He has also worked as a research assistant for the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Small Towns, Austere Times: The Dialectics of Deracinated Localism (2014).

Sunder Katwala is the director of the identity and integration think-tank British Future. He has previously worked as a journalist. He was general secretary of the Fabian Society think-tank from 2003 to 2011, and a leading writer and internet editor at the Observer, a research director of the Foreign Policy Centre and commissioning editor for politics and economics at the publisher Macmillan. He writes for the Guardian, the New Statesman and The Spectator’s Coffee House blog.

Rachel Sylvester is a journalist at The Times, where she writes a weekly political column. She started writing about politics in 1996 and was a lobby correspondent on The Daily Telegraph, before becoming political editor of the Independent on Sunday. She joined The Times in 2008.

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