Between Mobility and Migration: The Consequences and Governance of Intra- European Movement

One of the cornerstones of the development of the European Union is the principle of free movement within the EU. The EU has created an unprecedented area in which not just capital, goods and services but also people can move around relatively freely. This freedom of movement is guaranteed by EU law and enshrined in the principles of the Lisbon strategy with the objective of creating ‘more and better jobs, by reducing obstacles to mobility’ (European Commission 2004, 2007). Especially after the EU enlargements in 2004 and 2011 with various Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, the scale of EU movement has grown significantly. Migration from the EU Member States in Central and Eastern-Europe (CEE) has evolved into one of the main migration flows within Europe (Black et al. 2010). For instance, it resulted in more than 2.2 million people from Poland engaged in international migration or mobility between 2004–2007 (Grabowska-Lusinska and Okolski 2009). This contributed to a ‘new face’ of East-West migration in Europe (Favell 2008; Favell and Recchi 2010). It is therefore important to know more about migration from Central and Eastern to Western parts of Europe. Because this ‘new face’ has not remained without consequences (Van Ostaijen et al. 2017).


Conceptualizing Free Movement and Its Consequences
In migration and integration studies it has remained unclear how we could understand 'European free movement'. Should it be perceived as a 'new' type of migration, as permanent settlement or as more flexible, circular and temporary migration? As Adrian Favell argues: "Within this, European citizens -old and new-can move freely against a wider, transnational horizon that encourages temporary and circular migration trends, and demands no long term settlement or naturalisation in the country of work" (Favell 2008: 705-706). However, this contrasted with studies acknowledging a more diversified picture including the more permanent settlement migration as well (Engbersen et al. 2013;Friberg 2012Friberg , 2013. These studies show that beyond the seasonal and circular forms of migration, other types of migration have emerged which involves a more permanent presence of CEE migrants in the receiving regions. Some migrants maintain transnational connections that connect them to their region of origin as well as their host regions. Some settle permanently in their receiving societies and bring over or found new families, while in other cases, migrants move on to other parts in Europe (Glorius et al. 2013;Lafleur and Stanek 2016). Thus, we see a diversifying picture in European free movement, with a large variety between individual citizens. Therefore, this book starts with explicating two important assumptions. First of all, based on previous research (Engbersen et al. 2013;Friberg 2012Friberg , 2013, we assume that European free movement towards Western Europe is characterized by significant diversity and heterogeneity in socio-economic status and time-span. This means that although there are many CEE migrants working in low-qualified and low-paid jobs, there are also medium-skilled and highly skilled migrants working at, for instance, universities or in the (medical) business industry. This socio-economic diversification includes a varied perspective on socio-economic status which leads to a socio-economic differentiation of CEE migrants in types of migrants, such as: 'knowledge workers', 'entrepreneurs', 'manual workers', 'persons working in private households', 'sex workers', 'trafficked persons', 'students', 'non-working spouses/partners and children' and 'beggars and homeless people'.
Next to the socio-economic differentiation, European free movement is characterized by variation in time, in the temporality of stay. This includes a wide range between temporary flexible categories and permanent settlement. This variation could lead to large differences concerning to what extent host societies develop extra procedures, policies and legislation. Both diversifications are visualized in the figure below, which visualizes the socio-economic and temporal differentiation in two axes and shows a variety of different types of CEE migrants that one could associate with the varieties considered. While we are sensitive for the mobility versus migration language debate, for aims of academic clarity, we stayed close to the body of literature on migration studies here, to be able to give our fieldwork the most effective and feasible starting point possible. Because the Fig. 1.1 below has been used as a heuristic device in this project to sensitize the research focus for the varieties involved, not to (normatively) depict specific categories for this research. The empirical chapters will give substance to the specific 'corners' of this figure.
Besides the socio-economic diversification, this research presumes that European free movement is spatially 'unevenly distributed' (Gijsberts and Lubbers 2015;25). This implies that CEE populations tend to be spatially concentrated in specific rural and urban areas. As such, a second expectation is that, given the 'uneven distribution' of migrants in specific localities, the diversification of intra-European movement also leads to a diversification of local consequences: not only in terms of labour market issues, but a wide range of issues that evolve from short-term (housing) to long-term implications (language and education) in the receiving and sending countries. We assume that different types of CEE migrants have different social implications on the receiving urban and rural regions. This holds importance for the social consequences related to European free movement, since implications of circular and footloose migration can be expected to be primarily socio-economic, concentrating particularly on labour market incorporation and housing issues. While implications of settlement migration can be expected to be more of a socio-cultural character, raising issues like language skills, education and participation. Therefore, this points to issues of integration, segregation and social cohesion in urban regions. An important issue is the effect of CEE migrants in disadvantaged neighbourhoods in their contribution to strengthen or weaken the social cohesion within these neighbourhoods (Musterd et al. 2016). Therefore, to study this spatial specificity and concentration of CEE migrants in specific urban and rural spaces, we distinguished several 'domains' regarding socio-economic, socio-cultural and legal-political issues, in which we expected that European free movement could cause implications. For that aim we comparatively studied implications regarding labour market, registration (socio-economic); education, language, communication, societal participation, housing and neighbourhood issues (socio-cultural); and social security, health care and political participation issues (legal-political). We expected that European free movement could cause implications in all these domains, differentiated by the spatial context in which CEE migrants reside or work. With this division we aimed to guide and structure our analysis primarily on the social consequences in the urban regions.

Governance of Free Movement in a Multi-Level Setting
The second part of the book focuses on how local, national and European (governmental) authorities responded on features related to 'European free movement' in its multi-level setting. Since European free movement is clearly related to European Union regulations of free movement, adopted by member-state permissions in the 'opening' of their labour markets and faced by local municipalities in terms of housing and neighbourhood consequences (Black et al. 2010;Van Puymbroeck et al. 2011;Engbersen and Snel 2012), this can clearly be seen as a topic in a multi-level setting. And since multiple governmental bodies are involved in this issue, it holds importance to stress the differences between the governance structures of Sweden, Turkey, the Netherlands and Austria. The four selected countries represent four distinctly different political-administrative institutional models, spanning multi-level to unitary organization of decision-making. They range from Austria's formally federal system with strong elements of multi-level corporatism and extensive social partnership participation in decision-making to Turkey's unitary state system with policy-making set in a highly hierarchical top-down institutional framework (Sert et al. 2015: 8). Between these two cases, Sweden and the Netherlands display elements of lingering -but different -traditions of corporatism and social partnership decision-making located within unitary state systems that feature strong aspects of a local decision-making capacity. At an overarching level, three of the countries, Austria, Netherlands and Sweden, are well-established democracies (Lijphart 2012) and EU members while Turkey is from a strict institutional European perspective and with regard to intra-European movement an 'outlier case' since Turkey has an 'EU Candidate' status. But for a variety of reasons, that will be explained at length later on, Turkey has relevance. Because of historical (ethinc ties with Bulgaria), geographical (proximity of large urban regions) and legislative (non-EU memberstate but importance on European migration flows) reasons, Turkey has relevance and importance. Thus, from a strict institutional European perspective, what could be defined as an 'outlier' case, contains multiple reasons why Turkey is an important and relevant case for this research. The table below outlines the variances in the case-studies selected, particularly regarding the outlook of governance structures  Table 1.2 shows the differences between the cases, based on centralized state traditions. Most relevant is to what extent his variances are of influence in how the local, national and European authorities interact with each other on the issue of CEE migration. The literature, which outlines this multi-level setting, observes a growing role of local governments in general and cities in particular in global and multi-level systems (Brenner 2004;Holston and Appadurai 1999;Isin 2000;Le Gales 2002;Sassen 1999). It has become manifest that in the context of 'glocalization', cities are becoming hubs for innovation in governance networks. Therefore, cities should not only be studied as subnational governments that are affected by Europeanization (Emelianoff 2013), but as key players in multi-level networks and as motors of policy dynamics 'from below', also within the topic of 'European free movement'. From this perspective, local governments develop various strategies to influence national and EU policymaking (Heinelt and Neiderhafner 2008;Scholten et al. 2017). One strategy involves lobbying or negotiating policy preferences at other levels of government, also described as 'vertical venue shopping' (Pralle 2003;Guiraudon 2000). Vertical venue shopping means that if local governments cannot achieve certain policy preferences at their own level, they can act as policy entrepreneurs in relation to other levels of government. This venue shopping can take place via formal channels where governments of different levels meet, but also via informal policy lobbying or political networks. Such efforts can influence governance processes at other levels which involves networking and coalition building with other cities or local governments (Gustavsson et al. 2009) and transnational municipal networks (Kern and Bulkeley 2009). These actions can be considered as horizontal governance processes of local authorities interacting and developing relationships with each other. Next to these horizontal interactions, local governments can also interact vertically with more central or national located authorities to adopt or modify policies, laws and legislation.
To understand the role of local authorities in their responses towards European free movement, we will focus on the policy networks and governance approaches in relation with other public, private and NGO stakeholders. For that aim we developed a conceptual frame to understand the policy networks and governance approaches in its multi-level setting (Scholten 2013). With a typology of four theoretical ideal types of governance approaches we aim to understand to what extent public authorities constructed horizontal and vertical relations to develop policies, laws and legislation on CEE related topics: 1. Multi-level governance Characterized by a more or less equal relationship in terms of engagements and participation among the various levels that are relevant to a specific governance Istanbul Edirne situation. In multi-level governance situations, policies at various levels are synchronized without a clear hierarchy. In the case of intra-European movement, the concept multi-level governance would apply in particular to situations where the local, national and European level are involved. When one of these levels is missing, we can also speak of 'multiple level governance.' 2. Top-down governance Characterized by a hierarchical relationship in which the highest level steers the overall governance response for actors from all other involved layers. 'Lower' policy levels are primarily involved in terms of policy implementation, not policy formulation.

Bottom-up governance
Characterized by a leading role of local governments in agenda setting and formulating policy solutions that require policy actions also at other 'higher' levels of governance. In the literature, this model has also been described as the 'localist' model.

Disjointed governance
Characterized by 'horizontal' governance processes at various levels, without actual vertical relations between the different levels. In this model, the policymaking logics at different levels are largely decoupled.
To address European free movement in its multi-level setting, the case studies are analysed by the above-distinguished ideal types of governance.

Outline of the Book
The aim of this book is to comprehensively address a theoretical and empirical understanding of the consequences of intra-European movement in general and CEE migration in particular, in terms of variety of types of migration and social implications and its linkage with governance approaches. Whereas the current state of the art in the literature provides a good overview of migration flows and the varying types of migration from CEE countries, the social implications of CEE migration for urban regions and how urban regions deal with this from a governance perspective have been relatively unexplored (Friberg 2012;Black et al. 2010;Düvell and Vogel 2006;Okólski 2001;Wallace and Stola 2001;Geddes and Boswell 2011). In the sections that follow we will elaborate on these elements and further develop the expectations that guide us throughout this book. This leads us to the following sections: 1) 'Types of intra-European movement and their consequences'. This part addresses the size and types of CEE migration, addressing the more sociological and migration studies questions to understand European free movement more as a circular, permanent or more flexible phenomenon; addressing the social consequences perceived by stakeholders in the urban regions, addressing geographic, sociological and migration issues to understand the spatial implications of European free movement; 2) 'Multi-level governance'. This part addresses the policy networks and governance responses, including political science, public administration and governance studies issues to understand European free movement as a multilevel phenomenon; 3) 'Perspectives from sending and receiving regions', addressing the consequences for sending regions such as Poland, Czech Republic and Turkey It is important to mention that especially the first two parts are guided by theoretically or conceptually informed notions on 'consequences' and 'governance'. As such, the first section in the book is guided by a typology of different types of free moving EU citizens. The introduction elaborates on this typology, based on previous studies of free movement in the EU (such as Black et. al. 2010). Chapter 2 by Deniz Sert distinguishes eight types of 'EU free moving citizens' based on two dimensions, including the time-specificity of movement. In her contribution she observes that creating a typology of CEE migration and including a diversified picture of types of migrants in this research as a heuristic device for comparison creates a tool with an exploratory value for answering research questions in a valuable way.
The added value of this heuristic device can be seen in Chap. 3 in which Ursula Reeger shows, guided by the diversification of CEE migration, what kind of socialand economic implications free movement has regarding stakeholders. This has been studied with a focus on its urban specificity, acknowledging that free movement is 'unevenly spread' amongst specific rural and urban municipalities. It shows that a detailed look at the implications in various domains for different types of migrants reveals that these are often interrelated with each type displaying its own "chain of implications". For some types of migrants, these linkages result in vicious cycles difficult to escape or a domino effect of implications, multiplying their effects due to their social or economic position. These empirical chapters are complemented by Chaps. 4 and 5 by Godfried Engbersen en Rinus Penninx. In Chap. 4, Godfried Engbersen translates the empirical data to the broader debates within sociological theory on liquid modernity (Engbersen 2012). By his concept of liquid migration he concludes that the findings show that this liquidity or temporality of mobility does not cover the full story. More long term or settlement types show that there is more to say than only the 'new face' of East-West fluidity could suggest. In Chap. 5, Rinus Penninx questions the 'newness' of this migration and compares this with other migration regimes in the past. He concludes that comparisons are hard because of the changed and different regulatory context, legal instruments and the position of private organisations in the management of this migration. As such, he provides some context embeds the findings in a historical framework. The second section on 'governance' focuses on how local, national and European (governmental) authorities responded to the types of free movers and their socialand economic implications. This is also guided by a conceptual frame, a typology of five theoretical ideal types of governance approaches to map the horizontal and vertical relations in which policies, laws and legislation on CEE related topics are developed. In her Chap. 6, Karin Zelano shows the story from 'inside Brussels' and how free movement and its governance has been perceive by stakeholders on EU level. She reveals a more top-down approach and a governance gap between the EU, member-states and local municipalities on this issue. In Chap. 7 by Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Jonas Hinnfors, Andrea Spehar and Karin Zelano, they show the empirical governance variety between the selected cases of The Netherlands, Sweden, Austria and Turkey. And despite the institutional and political difference between the cases, multi-level governance seems to be absent in most instances. In his Chap. 8, Dion Curry develops indicators to understand multi-level governance in much more detail and embedded in the multi-level governance literature. He reveals how the findings develop this strand of literature for instance by showing the need to separate out multi-level contexts from multi-level governance. Finally, in Chap. 9 Alex Balch observes the central role of national governments on European decision-making. He sees a lot of political conflict and contestation which causes social denizenship for some citizens in Europa. Highlighting the politicized character of this topic, he shows how the findings could be understood in relation to political science literatures and beyond.
In the third section 'perspectives from sending and receiving regions' it connects the findings on intra-European movement to the literature on Central and Eastern European countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic, which are important 'sending' countries of intra-European movement, as well as Turkey as a new emergent destination country of migration from Central and Eastern Europe. In Chap. 10, Marta Kindler shows in detail the positive and negative effects of free movement for Poland as a sending and receiving country. By a detailed analysis of what is going on in Poland she shows the 'double governance challenge' evolving in Poland. By focussing on Czech careworkers in Austrian regions, Dusan Drbohlav and Lenka Pavelkova show in Chap. 11 a new emerging type of MICO, of migration and commuting, in-between old notions of settlement, transborder movement and mobility. And finally, in Chap. 12, Deniz Karci Korfali and Tugba Acar show how a diversification of migration affects the regions of Edirne and Istanbul and how this contributes to the 'key importance' of governance challenges. They also explain the specificities of the Turkish case as a state centred hierarchal order and top-down approach on policy, to better understand the position of Turkey as case within European free movement. Finally, in the Chaps 13 and 14, Mark van Ostaijen, Peter Scholten and Adrian Favell formulate concluding thoughts on the project of IMAGINATION, the empirical and theoretical contributions and how this can be interpreted into larger bodies of knowledge. More specifically, Adrian Favell concludes on the whole volume with an epilogue reflecting on the contributions of the book to the literature on European free movement.
As can be understood from previous notions on the subsequent chapters, this book is set-up to relate the empirical data gathering with broader theoretical debates. As such, the first two parts: 'consequences' and 'governance', are finalized with theoretical chapters. As such, in the first 'consequences' part, the debate is focussing on the body of literature in migration studies and beyond, questioning if this is an 'exceptional' phenomenon, can we see it as 'liquid migration' or is this 'new face' of East-West or CEE migration more 'old wine in new bottles'? In the 'governance' section, the debate focuses on Europeanization literature and governance studies, contesting the multi-level character of this governance setting and discussing the European politics and policymaking processes of free movement. These chapters are written by scholars who are experts in their field, invited to reflect on the empirical contributions and to embed this into a number of thematically related theoretical discussions. The authors of these chapters were not involved in the IMAGINATION project, but do reflect on the IMAGINATION findings in their contributions. All these chapters were discussed during a workshop in Gothenburg in December 2015 by the authors.

IMAGINATION Project
The empirical material stems from a research project funded by the Joint Programing Initiative (JPI) Urban Europe: IMAGINATION, 'Urban Implications and Governance of CEE migration'. This 3-year project of empirical research was carried out between June 2013 and June 2016, implemented by interdisciplinary teams in Turkey, Sweden, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland and The Netherlands including sociologists, political scientists, geographers and public administration scholars. This interdisciplinary approach of the IMAGINATION research project also stimulated the confrontation of the empirical findings on European free movement with broader literatures from migration studies, geography, sociology, political sciences and public administration theory.
The project followed an innovative approach in terms of methodology. The empirical analyses in the book are based on comparative large-scale in-depth interviews with various stakeholders, as well as a systematic data collection effort, document analyses and literature review. In terms of interviews, stakeholders were involved from very different positions, in order to allow for a multiple perspective analysis of CEE migration. This includes policymakers from different levels, but also representatives from migrant organizations, NGO's, housing corporations, labour recruitment agencies and business associations. We believe that this not only allows for a more balanced 'multi-actor' view on CEE migration, it also provides a more comprehensive, valid and reliable method for the study of a topic on which official data is often lacking or incomplete. This applies in particular to the case of CEE migration, as many migrants are not registered.
Thus, as primary unit of analysis not countries or cities, but urban regions were selected as most significant objects of research. Since European free movement is not only an urban but also a rural phenomenon, local consequences are often not limited by the city boundaries where many migrants live, but also located into nearby suburban and rural areas where CEE migrants work. The notion of urban regions thus focuses on cities together with their suburban areas and nearby rural areas to capture the complementary social implications within daily urban systems of labour, housing and leisure. Urban regions were selected from three countries (The Netherlands, Sweden and Austria), which received relatively large numbers of CEE migrants but 'opened' their labour market borders to CEE countries in different periods and in different ways. Next to this we selected one non-European 'outlier case' (Turkey) to study the consequences of EU laws and regulations on the urban cases in a non-EU member state. The selected urban regions were Fig. 1.2.
It is worth to mention some important considerations in the case study selection process. First of all, as important selection criterion, Austria, the Netherlands and Sweden are representations of different transition regimes in Europe. They all opened their borders at different points in time (Sweden in 2004; the Netherlands in 2007; Austria in 2011 for A8 countries), which allowed the project to study the effects of this variety. But in this book, also other cases are included, such as: a) A most-likely case (Poland); b) A least-likely case (Czech Republic) c) An outlier case (Turkey) We will explain this rationale first. Because first of all, Poland and the Czech Republic are two important sending (and receiving) regions of CEE migrants. Especially Poland has been the most significant sending country during the free movement regulations. As mentioned before, with more than 2.2 million people between 2004-2007, Poland can be considered as a very significant and 'mostlikely case' to study this phenomenon (Grabowska-Lusinska et al. 2009). The Czech Republic instead, has always been a rather reluctant case of international migration. Czechs seem to be well rooted and reluctant in moving out. The overall Czech emigration is relatively low compared with some of the other countries in this book (see the chapter of Drbolav and Pavelkova in this book). However, statistics are rather unreliable since most movement is not formally registered. This can be seen by other, estimated, stock data of 13,000 Czechs working in Austria in 2014 (see Chap. 11 of Drbolav and Pavelkova). According to this data, Austria is an important and significant rising country for transborder movement and Czechs working abroad. This raises various questions regarding the drivers and opportunities of these movers and how they do not comply with the general reluctance of Czechs. This legitimates the significance of this least-likely case of Czech Republic in this volume. And finally, the fourth section is completed by the case study on Turkey. First of all, from a strict institutional European perspective, Turkey could be seen as an 'outlier' case. However, for a number of reasons, Turkey has relevance and importance to gain knowledge about this emerging phenomenon. First of all, because of historical interrelations and legacies, a significant number of Bulgarians have a Turkish passport. This has historically evolved into a stable amount of transborder movements between Bulgaria and Turkey. It is interesting to see to what extent this historical migration corridor changes by new regulatory legacies from the EU. Next to this, from a geographical point of view, and with a focus on urban consequences, one of the most proximate and largest urban regions outside the European territory is, next to for instance Saint Petersburg, the Istanbul urban region. Next to this, Edirne is selected as a more rural and border region, to gain a better understanding of Fig. 1.2 Overview cases included (Important to mention is that there is a double inclusion on CEE countries in this study. In the first place, the study interprets 'CEE' by the countries Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, Albania, Belarus, Bosnia Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro and Serbia. Secondly, given this overview, there is a focus applied to the most significant and important countries (in terms of population size) for sending and receiving regions in Europe. The selected countries for this book are shown in the map above).
(Source: Korfali et al. 2014) transborder movements. Edirne maintains a large Bulgarian-Turkish community and the region of Edirne is one of the most important entry points of Turkey. As illustration, in 2010, 1.5 million people from CEE countries entered Turkey via the region of Edirne on a total of 2.5 million and 600.000 CEEs entered Istanbul on a total of seven million people (Korfali et al. 2014

Methodological Considerations
While this book is built upon the comparative framework outlined above and the data collected in the context of the IMAGINATION project, it is worth considering some methodological issues here. To overcome a repetition of argumentation, specific issues of methodology are considered in the forthcoming chapters. However, the chapters share an overall methodological framework that will be discussed in the following. First of all, to make a systematic comparison, and to select case studies, all research went through a bibliographic and statistical analysis of secondary data sources which enabled a preliminary comparative setting. For that aim, the research teams have collected available data on CEE migration pertaining to their respective countries, and tried to synchronize these figures. First, they utilized secondary sources, reviewing the literature of previous research as well as available official statistics. This provided with a valuable source on stocks and flows of migrants including basic demographic features such as age and gender, but lacks important information on education, professional background or legal status. Additionally, especially where no official data were available, teams conducted semi-structured interviews with different stakeholders to get estimates of the scale of CEE migration and to discover different types of migration. These included representatives of the CEE migrants mostly from different migrant organizations, officials from local governments, relevant private agencies such as labour recruitment agencies, and NGOs involved in the related areas of migration like housing corporations and educational institutions. The analysis in Chap. 2 contains the key features of this first datagathering step. As mentioned in that chapter it shows the outcome of exploring, classifying and summarising quantitative data that could be gathered around the selected cases in this project.
Secondly, the study included a multi-level stakeholder analysis to capture the perceptions of stakeholders in various positions concerning the consequences as well as the governance of intra-European movement. In all case studies, the survey was distributed amongst experts, local and national policymakers as well as NGO's.
The strength of a multiple stakeholder analysis is that it enables the project to capture a variety of perspectives, from different positions as well as focussing on different elements of governance. The multiple-stakeholder analysis involved three interrelated stages of data gathering (Table 1.3) (see: Enengel and Reeger 2015) of: (1) Online survey (primary inventory of implications, N = 174) (2) Expert interviews (qualitative in-depth information on stage 1, N = 57) (3) Focus groups (reflection of the findings from stages 1 and 2, N = 65) As a first step, the online survey was implemented as a 'mapping exercise', to establish a primary inventory of relevant issues and types of migration. The design was comparatively developed and implemented during spring 2014 in all eight urban regions and resulted in 174 returned questionnaires. The people selected for this questionnaire was based on our previous experience working in the research domain of CEE migration, having done the desk research of phase one and the informal interviews. The professionals that came up from that work have been consulted in this explorative phase. Content-wise, the questionnaires were built up, just like the interviews and focus groups, on the three main pillars of this research.
Respondents were asked about a) types of CEE migration b) urban consequences of CEE migration and c) governance issues relating to CEE migration.
Secondly, after mapping the outcomes of the survey, additional expert interviews were set up to delve deeper into what has been mentioned in the online survey. Similar to the online survey, experts were selected according to predefined criteria based on variety of 1) their relationship to the respective urban regions 2) their professional affiliation (NGO, public, private). The interviews were held during autumn and fall of 2014 and involved 57 expert interviews with 66 interviewed participants. With the explicit aim to follow-up on the online survey, especially those were selected who indicated interest in future participation, complemented with those unable or not initially approached for the survey. The interviews were transcribed and a systematic grid of codes and sub-codes enabled a comparative analysis. Linz n = 23 n = 8 (9) n = 8 Vienna n = 23 n = 5 (7) National level -n = 1 The Netherlands The Hague n = 15 n = 5 n = 16 Rotterdam n = 15 n = 5 National level n = 16 n = 2 Sweden Gothenburg n = 22 n = 8 (12) n = 30 Stockholm n = 15 n = 5 (7) National level -n = 4 Turkey Edirne n = 24 n = 7 n = 11 Istanbul n = 21 n = 7 National level --Finally, the multi-stakeholder analysis was complemented by Urban Living Labs, focus groups of deliberative exchange of ideas and reflections on preliminary research findings. This method enabled to validate some initial findings and bring further and deepen ideas about data found. Participants were selected based on the interviews and the people mentioned. Since much depended on the professional involvement of stakeholders in this issue and the knowledge they have, all three phases were layers of chronological snowball sampling strategies. This contains clear biases for which the research was sensitive, but was chosen in order to get the most relevant expertise on board as possible. All Living Labs were held in December 2014 on four sites and were recorded, transcribed and analysed in a comparative fashion. As such, all data collection carried out in all six urban regions was guided by a strict common framework. In total, more than 250 contacts with key stakeholders from the public sector, semi-public, private institutions and with NGOs have taken place.