The project ‘Future Migration Scenarios for Europe’ aims to understand the motivations, different forms, and concrete modalities that characterize migration processes at multiple geographical scales—international, regional, and local—in relation to the development of possible future scenarios.

Funded under the European Union’s framework program for research and innovation “Horizon2020”, the three-year FUME project is coordinated by Henning Sten Hansen and Carsten Kessler of Aalborg University and is carried out in collaboration with 9 scientific partners from 8 European countries, featuring multidisciplinary teams composed of experts in the fields of demography, economics, geography, geo-informatics, sociology, and statistics, among others.

FUME – Future Migration Scenarios for Europe has the multiple objective of:
• determining the main drivers that facilitate different types of migrant movement through the analysis of key factors at the regional and local level, and the role they play in becoming elements of attraction or push factors for migration;
• developing scenarios capable of describing how future socio-demographic, economic, and environmental transformations and challenges at the regional level could influence future migration mobility processes toward and within Europe.
In this regard, FUME – Future Migration Scenarios for Europe will provide substantial support for policy definition and planning by formulating integrated and coherent scenarios on how migration toward and within Europe might unfold in relation to potential demographic, socio-economic, political, and environmental challenges.

The local perspective
Local factors play an important role in international migration processes, from the decision to migrate through transit phases to settlement in destination countries. Almost all international migrants generally head toward larger cities in destination countries: these trajectories are either direct or result from previous internal movements. This dynamic is also a recurring feature in the European context, where in many cities population growth can be largely attributed to migrant flows. At the same time, in countries of origin, larger cities often serve as transit hubs for reaching destinations abroad. Before leaving their country, many migration candidates from villages and small towns in countries of origin transit through and relocate to these larger cities. Cities, therefore, in both countries of origin and destination, play a decisive role in global migration processes; understanding the local dimension of migration is necessary to move beyond partial interpretations connected to the adoption of analytical models that are limited to considering global or national dimensions.

IRPPS contributes to the FUME – Future Migration Scenarios for Europe project primarily within Work Package 3, which concerns the development of narrative scenarios on international migration, with the preparation of a report on drivers of international migration, and within Work Package 6 (thematic studies) through two case studies focusing on urban contexts in Senegal and the metropolitan area of Rome (Metropolitan City of Rome).