Performing The Intercultural City

"Performing the Intercultural City explores how Toronto--a representative global city in the first country in the world to adopt a policy of official multiculturalism--stages its diversity through its many intercultural theater companies and troupes. By examining the ways in which Indigenous, Filipino, Latino/a and Afro-Caribbean Canadian theater in Toronto has developed play structures based on culturally specific forms of expression, Performing the Intercultural City analyzes the ways in which theater companies from a variety of marginalized communities of color in Toronto have worked across cultural difference to produce a new kind of intercultural performance"--

The resulting cultural differences can often create problems and conflict. In Europe alone, the sheer scale of migration is forcing the issue to the top of the political agenda. The Intercultural City brings together scholars from a range of disciplines - including urban studies, geography, planning, sociology, political science and spatial design - to explore both the failings of existing policies to manage diversity and to examine how one might begin to create ways to remove obstacles and enhance the integration of migrants and minorities. Combining fresh theoretical insights with studies from cities in Europe, North America, Asia and Africa, The Intercultural City offers a timely and important contribution to the challenge of managing diversity in the city of the twenty-first century.

Intercultural cities introduces a new model of local governance and policy in the age of diversity: the model of intercultural integration. This model has been built on the basis of experience in real-life cities and with their active participation. City-to-city mentoring and learning have played a key role in this process. This volume explains what intercultural integration means in practice: how it affects policies, governance and citizenship, public discourse, media relations, public services and the urban environment. It reviews the processes that facilitate the development of intercultural strategies and presents a wide range of examples, including the intercultural profiles of 11 cities across Europe. Intercultural integration adds another dimension to the management of culturally diverse populations, compared to previous models, in particular multiculturalism. In addition to non-discrimination, equal opportunities and cultural rights, interculturalism focuses on building trust and cohesion by encouraging interaction and mixing between cultural groups in the public realm and encouraging a positive discourse and attitude to diversity within the community.It also focuses on improving the efficiency of public services by making them more culturally sensitive and adapted to the needs of diverse users, and on the need for specific services such as those dealing with intercultural mediation and conflict prevention.

In a world of increasing mobility, how people of different cultures live together is a key issue of our age, especially for those responsible for planning and running cities. New thinking is needed on how diverse communities can cooperate in productive harmony instead of leading parallel or antagonistic lives. Policy is often dominated by mitigating the perceived negative effects of diversity, and little thought is given to how adiversity dividend or increased innovative capacity might be achieved. The Intercultural City, based on numerous case studies worldwide, analyses the links between urban change and cultural diversity. It draws on original research in the US, Europe, Australasia and the UK. It critiques past and current policy and introduces new conceptual frameworks. It provides significant and practical advice for readers, with new insights and tools for practitioners such as theintercultural lensindicators of opennessurban cultural literacy andten steps to an Intercultural City. Published with Comedia.

Most countries in Europe and indeed around the world are facing the challenges of international migration and integration of minorities. It falls primarily upon cities to design and implement policies that foster community cohesion and turn cultural diversity into a factor of development rather than a threat.This guide is designed for city leaders and practitioners wishing to learn from the Intercultural Cities pilot project run by the Council of Europe and the European Commission in developing an intercultural approach to diversity management and integration. This approach has been built on the basis of experience in dozens of real-life cities in redesigning their policies and reshaping their governance to ensure equal opportunities and realise a diversity advantage.The guide recommends steps and measures to help develop an intercultural strategy and monitor its implementation. It illustrates the elements of such a strategy with analytical questions, suggestions and examples of practice in various European cities.It is expected that any city embarking on the Intercultural Cities agenda is a confident and competent entity that is able to creatively adapt the general concepts and actions contained in this guide to local circumstances.This guide is therefore not an instruction manual but rather an aide-memoire to support cities as they create their own trajectory.

This book sets out to explore the political and social potential of intercultural policy for cities by bringing together advances in the areas of urban planning and intercultural theory. In recent years, demographic changes in cities in many parts of the world have led to increasing concerns about inter-ethnic tensions, social inequality, and racial discrimination. By virtue of their intermediate status, cities are in a particularly good position to design policy and programs that contribute to the well-being of all citizens, regardless of their origins. Certain cities have made significant advances in this domain, but until now very little work has been done to understand the specificity of work in the area of intercultural policy frameworks. The overall goal of this volume is to facilitate conversations between researchers and practitioners in their efforts to make cities more inclusive. This volume is the result of a series of on-going collaborations between academics and practitioners and it includes a number of original case studies that explain the evolution of intercultural policy from the point of view local actors. This collection will be of interest especially to policymakers and urban planners, but also to scholars and students in the areas of urban studies, public policy, anthropology, sociology, globalization and social sciences more generally. By leveraging recent advances in the field of intercultural policy and practice, this volume sheds light on the conditions and strategies that make intercultural cities a part of a common future.

This book is the first edited collection to respond to an undeniable resurgence of critical activity around the controversial theoretical term ‘interculturalism’ in theatre and performance studies. Long one of the field’s most vigorously debated concepts, intercultural performance has typically referred to the hybrid mixture of performance forms from different cultures (typically divided along an East-West or North-South axis) and its related practices frequently charged with appropriation, exploitation or ill-founded universalism. New critical approaches since the late 2000s and early 2010s instead reveal a plethora of localized, grassroots, diasporic and historical approaches to the theory and practice of intercultural performance which make available novel critical and political possibilities for performance practitioners and scholars. This collection consolidates and pushes forward reflection on these recent shifts by offering case studies from Asia, Africa, Australasia, Latin America, North America, and Western Europe which debate the possibilities and limitations of this theoretical turn towards a ‘new’ interculturalism.

Cities are increasingly recognized as new players in diversity studies, and many of them are showing evidence of an intercultural shift. As an emerging concept and policy, interculturalism is becoming the most pragmatic answer to concrete concerns in cities. Within this framework, this book covers two major concerns: how to conceptualize and how to implement intercultural policies. Through the use of theoretical and comparative case studies, the current most prominent contributors in the field examine an area that multicultural policies have missed in the past: interaction between people from different cultures and national backgrounds. By compiling the recent research in Europe and elsewhere this book concludes that interculturalism is becoming both an attractive and efficient new paradigm for diversity management.