Urban participation methods have become influential for practitioners in numerous fields, including the arts, community development, and education. In these settings, place-based initiatives often seek to improve the well-being of local communities through creative, collaborative responses to local issues. Such engagement with place can support adult education services and is especially transformative for socially marginalised groups.

Yet, few adult education services have implemented these pedagogies in practice and little is known about the perspectives and experiences of forced migrants within adult education services utilizing these approaches.

How can we help newcomers feel the cities "their own" and become visible in them?
How can they find their place?
How can cities benefit from interaction with newcomers?

Cities often become havens of human stories and potential. Despite the existence of integration programs and centers, and non-profit organizations that help newcomers integrate, migrants' voices often go unnoticed, resulting in misunderstanding, fear, and rejection in the host community. The city rejects newcomers who do not know how to fit into existing infrastructures, how to find themselves, and tell others about themselves.

Our project aims to help establish communication with forced migrants, refugees, and other categories of people coming to European cities in difficult life situations. Given the scope enabled by a small-scale partnership, we see this project as an exploration, in collaboration with the target group and institutions, for those who deal with the integration of young people among migrants, who study and develop new methods of outreach in the form of urban participation methods.

Through connecting grassroots migrant organizations, urban science researchers/practitioners (CISR e.V., Berlin), European project management & migrant-led NGO (CGE, Erfurt) and urban participation & education providers (Urban Foxes, Brussels), the consortium aims to bring a new and innovative set of actors to KA2 and Erasmus + Program and support each field of urban science and adult education out work to learn mutually from one another, while supporting the outgrowth of innovations in Adult Education, more inclusive cities, and responsive urban environments which reflect needs and rights.

Partners learning during mobilities will be documented within an Urban Casebook, enabling other institutions to have access to a series of innovative cases of outreach and participation in the context of adult education with target groups.

The project is implemented within the EU Program Erasmus +.
This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the European Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

Project management and experts of CISR e.V.:
Anastasia Puschkarewa
Lilia Voronkova
Oleg Pachenkov