Systemic discrimination doesn’t look the same everywhere. It is shaped by local histories, urban geographies, migration patterns, and institutional cultures. That’s why UNDETERRED chose not to focus on a single city — but to build knowledge across four of them, simultaneously, using the same methods and the same questions.
Bordeaux · Barcelona · Bucharest · Lausanne — four European cities, each with a distinct profile, each offering a different angle on the same challenge: how do institutions produce inequality without intending to?bse.u-bordeaux
Bordeaux
A mid-sized French metropolis undergoing rapid transformation, Bordeaux is both a city of growing wealth and of deepening spatial inequalities. Its working-class neighbourhoods — many home to large populations of immigrant background — have been at the centre of debates about urban segregation, discrimination in housing and employment, and unequal access to public services.
Bordeaux is also the coordinating city of the UNDETERRED project, home to the LACES research unit at the University of Bordeaux, led by scientific coordinator Fabien Sabatier. The Bordeaux Métropole is a direct non-academic partner of the project.
Key local partner: Bordeaux Métropole · URHAJ Nouvelle-Aquitaine
Barcelona
One of Europe’s most diverse and dynamic cities, Barcelona has a long history of migration — from internal Spanish migration in the 20th century to new waves of arrival from Latin America, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. It is also a city where questions of discrimination intersect with questions of identity and nationality in particularly complex ways.
The Barcelona research team is based at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, led by Dr. Sònia Parella, and focuses on the experiences of young people in specific urban neighbourhoods and university environments.
Key local partner: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
Bucharest
Bucharest represents a distinct and crucial perspective within the consortium: that of an emerging destination country. Romania is no longer only a country of emigration — it has become a place where migrants arrive, where national minorities have long histories, and where institutional responses to diversity are still developing.
The Bucharest team, based at the University of Bucharest, brings expertise in Roma inclusion, healthcare access, migration management and university discrimination. Their work produced one of the project’s first concrete outputs: the practical guide “Combating Discrimination in Universities”, published on International Human Rights Day, 10 December 2025.
Key local partner: University of Bucharest — Research Center FME · FILIA Center · CPES
Lausanne
Lausanne offers yet another lens: that of a small, highly international Swiss city, where a significant share of the population is foreign-born and where the tension between formal legal protections and everyday lived experience is particularly visible.
Switzerland’s specific political and legal context — with its federal structure, its direct democracy, and its layered residency statuses — creates distinctive forms of institutional discrimination that complement and contrast with those observed in the other three cities.
Key local partner: University of Lausanne
What makes this comparison powerful
The four cities were not chosen at random. Together they represent a variety of national legal frameworks, urban scales, migration histories and institutional cultures.
Conducting the same surveys, the same interviews and the same institutional analyses across all four cities allows UNDETERRED to distinguish what is context-specific from what is systemic — what is a local quirk from what is a European pattern.
This comparative dimension is at the heart of the project’s scientific contribution: showing that invisible discrimination is not an exception, but a rule — across borders, across sectors, across cities.