Volume 29.3 September 2005 641–3 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005. Published by Blackwell Publishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UK and Malden, USAIJURInternational Journal of Urban and Regional Research0309-13172005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.September 2005293 6413ArticlesDebates and DevelopmentsDebate DEBATES AND DEVELOPMENTS Introduction to a Debate on Migration, Diversity, Multiculturalism, Citizenship: Challenges for Cities in Europe and North America ROGER KEIL and KURT HÜBNER This collection of articles has its origin, at least in part, in a conference held in Toronto in March 2004. The Dutch Consulate had asked the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies to organize an event to reflect on the growing tensions in cities in the Netherlands around issues of diversity. Under the heading ‘Immigration, Multiculturalism and Citizenship in Europe’, scholars from both sides of the Atlantic discussed the challenges increased multicultural diversity presented to cities in Europe against the experience of North American, especially Canadian urban regions. The two articles by Ipsen and Ramirez Goicoechea were selected from this discussion for the present debate. They are complemented with two articles by Goonewardena and Kipfer and Wood and Gilbert, which were sent to IJURR independently. We decided to group the latter with the two European articles as their astute comments on the Canadian situation may also shed some light on the emerging discussion in Europe. It may be indicative of the state of the public conversation that our four articles try to develop innovative analytical perspectives to better understand the undercurrents of societal processes that frame these debates. At the outset, there seems some stereotypical polarization at work in this contraposition: while European urban societies appear to struggle with their allegedly newly increased demographic and cultural multiplicity, the Canadian cases seem to suggest that a policy specifically meant to regulate diversity — official multiculturalism — has hardly kept pace with the rapid changes this immigrant country has been undergoing. Where European societies seem to be frozen stiff with anxiety and fear over the demands placed on them by migration and diversity, Canadian society appears rather blasé about its growing differentiation in cultural, ethnic and racialized terms. The two European texts are from countries with a long history of tensions around difference. Germany and Spain were ruled with an iron fist and overtly racist ideologies through the middle of the twentieth century. Both countries have now enjoyed the fruits of relatively recent democratization (compared to, for example, the UK or France). The inclusivity of their societies has been a stated goal of these younger democracies as reflected in political practice and constitutional realities (such as the rather liberal asylum law in Germany after the second world war). However, inclusivity came with a price tag, at least in the German case where the modalities of its citizenship legislation denied the reality that Germany had de facto become an immigrant country after 1945.