E/CN.4/1996/72/Add.2 page 21 population with a view to furthering mutual understanding and cohabitation between Germans and aliens. The services offered by the various organizations promoting social intercourse are available to all Hamburg's non-German inhabitants. 7. Their main activities are: language courses, social counselling, organization of spare-time activities, educational and cultural services, services for children, for adolescents and in particular also for women, evening information and discussion sessions, and festivities. 8. The organizations that promote meetings between Germans and aliens are each allotted 3.5 permanent supervisory posts and an average annual budget of DM 500,000. 9. In pursuance of Hamburg's cultural policy, the “foreign cultures” department allocated in 1995 from its annual budget (DM 450,000) the funds required to subsidize 150 cultural projects concerning 30 nations. The function of such projects is the preservation, development and presentation to the public of the cultural heritage of immigrants, and they thus contribute to promoting intercultural dialogue within the city. Such events constitute a major factor of integration inasmuch as they reinforce the aliens' own cultural identity and enable the German population to learn about other cultures. Hamburg's cultural policy thus makes a major contribution to the fight against racist and xenophobic tendencies in society. 3. Expenditure 10. Apart from the cost of the general work to promote integration (for example costs of schooling, kindergartens, services in aliens' mother tongues and general social services), which is hard to estimate, the city of Hamburg devotes to the financing of special integration activities about DM 7 million, which is used for the operation of a social counselling network and of 10 organizations to promote meetings between Germans and aliens, for subsidizing foreign cultural and national associations, for promoting the culture of aliens in general and for the continuing occupational training of foreign workers. 11. The funds allotted annually by Hamburg to cover the living costs of refugees and the cost of special services for them are extremely large, amounting currently to DM 220 million (not counting the investments on housing). 12. For the accommodation of asylum-seekers and refugees from former Yugoslavia, Hamburg made available about 24,500 places in the form of tents, containers and rooms in hotels and boarding houses, together with floating residences where asylum-seekers are housed upon arrival. Planning to meet requirements and the design and erection of decent and socially acceptable lodgings represents an extremely complex and expensive task inasmuch as, to cope with the problem of refugees arriving in unpredictable numbers, with major peaks, account has to be taken of economic possibilities and of the limited land areas and premises available, while also avoiding conflicts with the population and among the refugees themselves and taking into consideration local political interests.