City: Cardiff Part 1: Introduction-context and starting point - URBACT
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City: Cardiff Part 1: Introduction- context and starting point
Basic info about your
city
Cardiff is the capital of Wales and the UK’s 11th largest city
and has a population of approximately 360,000. It is a rapidly growing city and has a very young population. The city
economy is demonstrating strong performance across a number of headline indicators, with jobs growth up,
unemployment down, visitor numbers up and growth in the number of new companies created.
The proceeds of economic growth have not however been felt by all of the city’s residents. Despite the jobs created and
the investment in the city centre, many of the poorest communities in Wales can be found in its capital city. The large
disparities in levels of unemployment, household poverty and workless households closely align with health, crime and
educational inequalities across the city.
Cardiff is one of the UK’s most multicultural cities and is considered by some to have been somewhat pioneering in terms
of multiculturalism. As a port city it has a long history of migration and diversity. However, historic migration was on a
relatively small scale compared to the patterns of migration to the city in the last 30 years. Whilst there are few reliable
indicators from which to deduce an accurate net migration figure for the city, the Census data shows that between
2001-2011, Cardiff ’s non-UK born resident population grew by 22,849, or 98%- an effective doubling in size. In the 20 year
period between 1991 and 2011 Cardiff ’s resident BME population has also more than doubled in size, growing from 7%
of residents in 1991 to 15% of residents in 2011. Today that figure is just over 17% (and one third of the city’s primary
school pupils). It is home to the largest UK born Somali population.
Cardiff is a city of sanctuary - part of a grassroots national movement which builds on a culture of hospitality and
welcome especially for individuals seeking sanctuary from war and persecution. On a national level, the Welsh government
Key characteristics of Our starting point
the Transfer Plan? Staff working on Prevent (a national government counter terrorism strategy) noted an increase in far right extremism
and activity in recent years. During 2018 and 2019, far right activists targeted wards in the south of the city, where there is
a high concentration of BME and migrant residents. This has included poster and graffiti campaigns using anti-Semitic,
Islamophobic and racist terminology and symbolism. This has contributed to a climate of fear and sense of exclusion for
some residents, particularly following a number of recent far right terrorist attacks internationally.
Cardiff Council has an established programme of work to support cohesion and promote equality in the city. These areas
of policy are however now delivered with significantly reduced budgets, limiting the resources that are available to deliver
significant campaigns or community based events to promote social contact amongst residents. The council works closely
with voluntary and community sector partners in this area of policy, and has an established cross-sector ‘Inclusive Cities’
taskforce to enhance inclusion in Cardiff. The taskforce have developed an action plan for inclusion in the city focusing on
four thematic areas:
• Priority 1: Social value and inclusive growth
• Priority 2: Communications and engagement
• Priority 3: Participation and social integration
• Priority 4: A multilingual smart city
What were the key characteristics in our Transfer Plan?
Our overall ambition was to develop a distinctive city brand and movement of residents and organisations who make a
visible commitment to remaining an open and tolerant city.
We sought to transfer the best practice by adapting it to our city context and local understanding of how residents
perceive these issues. We sought to build a robust evidence base, using both local data and research from think tanks such
as British Future, to inform how we deliver the Rumourless Cities project locally.
This meant that in our Transfer Plan we decided to adapt the ‘anti-rumour training’ to become more focused on
developing residents skills in talking about divisive and difficult topics, rather than a myth busting programme as our
evidence suggested that this can be counter-intuitive and produce a ‘backfire effect’.
More specifically this meant that our Transfer Plan consisted of the following four key modules :
Assets:
What assets/barriers The City Council had a number of assets to support the transfer process:
did we have?
• Local Capacity to deliver the programme.- Cardiff has two committed officers to lead on this project-
the Community Cohesion Co-Ordinator and the Countering Extremism Community Engagement Officer. There
will also be two Cohesion Officers, one working with children, and one working with adults, who can support the
delivery of local activities and engagement with residents.
• Political Support and Links to wider strategy- There is demonstrated political support for this project
including a supportive and active Council Leader and Cabinet who will be strong advocates for the work. Senior
council officers are informed and supportive of the project.
• Embedded within Cardiff ’s Inclusive Cities Strategy: The delivery of the Rumourless Cities project is included as a
key deliverable of Cardiff ’s Inclusive Cities Action Plan, which is the city’s formal commitment to improving equality
and inclusion in the city. Cardiff is also able to cascade knowledge and expertise from the UK Inclusive Cities
Network (Bristol, Liverpool, Peterborough, Glasgow, London + 5 new cities in 2019) and the Centre for Migration,
Policy and Society at the University of Oxford to the transfer network.
• Links to Welsh Government: Cardiff has strong links with the Welsh Government in this area of policy and
will be sharing learning from the project with the Welsh civil service. This may inform the next phases of their
national community cohesion programme in Wales.
• In addition , the City Council since 2016, had delivered the innovative Getting On Together (GOT) project for
school children and young people to challenge stereotyping and extremism. It was designed in response to
requests from teachers for guidance, resources and training to deliver a learning experience for pupils that would
challenge the misinformation that they might see online. It is now part of a three-year, European-funded project on
using the primary school curriculum to challenge extremism, to share and adopt this practice across councils in
Wales, Germany and Slovakia.
• Furthermore there are also a number of voluntary sector organisations and initiatives which deliver ad-hoc anti-
rumour/anti-prejudice work in Cardiff . These include:
o Hope Not Hate who organise community meetings, events and training for local residents to support
people to practically work together at a community level to reduce misunderstandings and create strongerWhat were our By month 24 of phase 2 we expected to have fully implemented the practice, recognising that all of the actions detailed in expectations for the our project plan are long-term and would continue following the closure of the Rumourless Cities Transfer Network. end? Part 2: Key Organisational learning points at city level
Have there been The main benefits of our participation in the programme have been:
benefits at city level? Learning from other cities facing common challenges
Has it impacted on The network provided a space for us to network with other European cities and share ideas and learning from each of
partnerships/ our respective transfer plans. We developed an enhanced understanding of ‘what works’ and how to best allocate
networks? Have resources in our future work.
stakeholders worked Developing an evidence base on local social attitudes
in new ways? Our extensive research has provided an evidence base on resident’s views towards migration and diversity and helped us
to identify areas to focus on with our other project deliverables and untapped opportunities where there are groups of
residents who are keen to support local welcome.
Testing and evaluating communications methods and delivery approaches
Although we have not, at the time of writing, been able to proceed with our planned community conversations and our
face-to-face delivery is on hold, we anticipate significant benefits from the ability to test potential narrative frames with our
residents when we convene our community conversations work later in the year, providing a robust evidence base on
how to communicate effectively at a local level on these complex issues.
New approaches to local participation
With our community conversations we hope to test coproduction in developing our future approach to building resilience
and tolerance in our community. Without the financial support of the network, we would not be able to conduct the
community conversations in an inclusive way, offering a participation fund to maximise the diversity of our participants and
actively include those from low incomes. The project therefore offered a rare opportunity to remove the barriers faced by
those seldom heard in local policy making and provided the resources to develop a truly inclusive roadmap to a fairer and
more inclusive city.
Whilst our stakeholders were already supportive of the goals of the project, they have taken an increasingly evidence-led
approach to how they deliver local cohesion projects, reflecting on and testing different ways of recruiting participants to
avoid the ‘usual suspects’ and reach those who would not automatically become involved in these forms of initiative. The
highly collaborative way of designing and implementing our local transfer plan was a different way of working for our team,
with much greater involvement from non-statutory stakeholders in designing and evaluating our approaches.
The organisations most closely involved in the local delivery of our project are:
Cardiff Council – including staff from our research, comms, cohesion and equality teams- staff from across the organisationHas the experience We are now working in a more collaborative and open way with a wide range of non-statutory stakeholders, recognising
led to changes that different organisations bring new approaches and audiences to the delivery of local cohesion projects.
(structural, policy, The evidence base we have established through our participation in the project will be used to inform future
strategic, operational) communications campaigns, funding applications and service delivery. The project has encouraged us to ensure we are
at city level? identifying metrics to measure the success of local initiatives and understanding our beneficiaries.
What have they
learned? We have a renewed focus as a local partnership on storytelling and using personal stories to convey complex messages
around diversity and inclusion in our city, rather than simply relying on ‘mythbusting’, and are using these tools to, for
example, communicate about the Covid-19 vaccination programme and counteract myths and misconceptions about the
vaccine.
As a council team, we have created new relationships with local sports and arts partners, enabling us to reach new and
non-traditional audiences with our work.
Part 3: Personal LearningWho have been the • The key individual beneficiaries of our participation in the network are the council officers who have led the
key individual implementation of the transfer plan locally and our partner NGOs, along with the politicians who have
beneficiaries in terms participated in network .
of learning? (Civil We have also shared the findings of the research elements of our project with a wider network of stakeholders including
servants ? Elected the UK network of Inclusive Cities, Welsh Government and think tanks who we are collaborating with on other projects.
officials? NGOs?
Others?) What have The key learning points have been:
been the key learning • It is recognised that several of our more practical deliverables have been postponed due to Covid-19, meaning
points? Please insert that we have not been able to fully test some of the approaches we wanted to implement in our city (social
any quotes from contact through sport, community conversations etc.)
individuals involved • There has however been significant learning in terms of the perspectives of local residents on issues concerning
diversity, migration and minority groups and how our approaches should be formulated to reflect this position and
current social attitudes. For example, our research has identified areas of our city where there are particular
tensions and concerns about how the city has changed and continues to change, places where people have limited
contact with newcomers/long-standing residents.
We have explored different communication approaches to build resilience to extremist narratives, drawing upon both the
approaches of our lead partner and other cities in our network, and extensive research on narrative frames from other
UK and US cities.
Quotes:
Diary Entry- Councillor Susan Elsmore, Cabinet Lead for Migration
25th October 2019
Reflection on Inclusive Cities and Rumourless Cities Conference
This week Cardiff was delighted to host a network of UK and European cities for a conference on the theme of remaining, and
strengthening our position as, open, global and welcoming in a fast-changing world.
Cardiff’s participation in the Inclusive Cities and Rumourless Cities Programmes is of crucial importance to its role not only as a
capital city but also as a leader in the field of migration.
Priding itself on the warmth of the welcome, Cardiff understands that for its economic and civic success we must engage allOur key insights were the importance of tailoring messaging to respond to the values and perspectives of the audience, Personal learning working collaboratively with trusted community venues and grassroots groups to secure involvement of seldom heard stories …. groups and harnessing sports and arts opportunities to engage new audiences. What were your key insights? The idea of working collaboratively with residents to create a city declaration, as has been completed in Hamburg, was an What people, aspect of the network’s activity that was of particular interest to our city. Likewise, the work completed by Warsaw to comments, ideas or deliver an interactive game to use in educational settings was also a new and innovative concept to make anti-racist words caught your teaching more accessible and engaging for young audiences. attention? What was the most The greatest challenge for our local team has undoubtedly been trying to deliver a variety of community-facing activities meaningful aspect of during Covid-19, with the majority of our deliverables for 2020 being postponed or requiring redesign due to the this activity? circumstances. We found that online alternatives were a poor substitute for the in-person work we hoped to deliver, What was most particularly our planned community conversations work. challenging? Part 4: Overall conclusions on progress
What progress has The elements we progressed in relation to the good practice were in relation to the research or ‘rumour mapping’. We
been made in completed extensive research on local attitudes. We also progressed some testing in terms of narrative frames for
adapting and communications campaigns although we were not able to progress the communications campaign we had planned as the
transferring the funding was pulled due to Covid-19 in mid-2020. We have however begun to collate our photobank of campaign images
Good Practice? What through our photography project. The training of anti-rumour agents, and the development of a local cohort of supporters
elements of the good who could have conversations in their neighbourhood, workplace etc. has not progressed as Covid-19 meant that we had
practice have you to delay the delivery of our community conversations work, although we still hope to deliver this in 2021. Other activities
learnt most from and to promote social contact were partially delivered, such as the Youth Cohesion Cup, although Covid-19 means that the
(to some extent) project has not been fully completed to date.
‘transferred’?
What have you learnt The main areas of learning for our city were drawn from Hamburg Altona and Warsaw, through their city declaration and
from other cities/ development of a game for young people. The participative way of developing the city declaration in Hamburg Altona was
projects through the of relevance to our community conversations and the use of digital across both projects was interesting, particularly as all
exchange and of our work had to shift online.
learning process?
How does this Without Covid-19 we would have transferred the best practice more completely. Our project is only partially completed
compare to your at this stage due to the fact we cannot resume face-to-face activities. At this stage we hoped to have developed a city
initial expectations? campaign using our other funding and to have tested this campaign with groups of residents and completed our
community conversations exercise. We aspired to have a comprehensive photobank full of images of everyday city life and
events in the city. These aspects of the project have not been fully realised. We did however achieve a comprehensive
research base, bring together a network of UK and European cities and city leaders through our conference and benefit
from several transnational exchanges with the other cities in our network.What supported/ The barrier to delivering our project has been Covid-19, as this work is very much dependent on being able to facilitate
obstructed the meaningful contact between local people and having honest and open conversations. Online dialogue is a very poor
process? What did substitute for what we wanted to deliver! A key aspect of learning for us is therefore that, despite the push to digitalise
we learn from this? methods of engagement, face-to-face dialogue is critical, particularly for those who are less heard in local decision-making.
Covid-19 how did
this change things However there were some benefits- the delivery of the online sessions on e.g. LGBT discrimination and the Regions
and how did you Week workshop meant that we were able to invite wider members of our team to benefit from those discussions than
adapt and did it lead we would have been able to if they were held in person.
to new ideas/
approaches? We chose not to shift our remaining deliverables online in the hope that we would still be able to deliver these in person
as we strongly believed that online delivery would diminish the impact of what we were trying to achieve and for the
community conversations work in particular, that this would not attract a diverse audience if they were just Zoom/Teams
meetings.
As our idea to photograph events and everyday life in the city was not possible due to Covid-19, we revised this element
to become a short photography course for young people from ethnic minority backgrounds to photograph their lives,
community and city. This has meant that our photo bank will have a more personal feel and has also supported local
young people to explore careers in creative industries where they are currently underrepresented.
Please add any links A Focus on Photography with the BAME Community - Coleg Gwent
to your project Rumourless Ci=es – Cardiff Youth Council
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