MIGRATION AND ITS IMPACT ON URBAN DEVELOPMENT IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Migration is an intensely debated phenomenon in the first decades of the 21st century, both at the international and national level, but most of the concerns are dedicated to the structure/size of international migrant flows and to the root causes of their migration. The urban environment provides both high-skilled and especially lowskilled migrants higher employment opportunities. The increase of migrants in the urban area is triggered also by population ageing, by the unequal development between the regions of the country or between states, by environmental and climate instability, etc. Cities are also the areas that provide higher education opportunities and where are placed the social networks to which migrants resort to either for integration, survival or economic opportunities. The paper proposes an analysis of the interdependencies between the trends and structure/dimension of migration flows and the urbanization degree in the main countries of destination at global, European and national level.