Urban Diversity

As the world’s urban populations grow, cities become spaces where increasingly diverse peoples negotiate such differences as language, citizenship, ethnicity and race, class and wealth, and gender. Using a comparative framework, Urban Diversity examines the multiple meanings of inclusion and exclusion in fast-changing urban contexts. The contributors identify specific areas of contestation, including public spaces and facilities, governmental structures, civil society institutions, cultural organizations, and cyberspace. The contributors also explore the socioeconomic and cultural mechanisms that can encourage inclusive pluralism in the world’s cities, seeking approaches that view diversity as an asset rather than a threat. Exploring old and new public spaces, practices of marginalized urban dwellers, and actions of the state, the contributors to Urban Diversity assess the formation and reformation of processes of inclusion, whether through deliberate actions intended to rejuvenate democratic political institutions or the spontaneous reactions of city residents.

Anti-migrant populism is on the rise across Europe, and diversity and multiculturalism are increasingly presented as threats to social cohesion. Yet diversity is also a mundane social reality in urban neighbourhoods. With this in mind, Studying Diversity, Migration and Urban Multiculture explores how we can live together with and in difference. What is needed for conviviality to emerge and what role can research play? This volume demonstrates how collaboration between scholars, civil society and practitioners can help to answer these questions. Drawing on a range of innovative and participatory methods, each chapter examines conviviality in different cities across the UK. The contributors ask how the research process itself can be made more convivial, and show how power relations between researchers, those researched, and research users can be reconfigured – in the process producing much needed new knowledge and understanding about urban diversity, multiculturalism and conviviality. Examples include embroidery workshops with diverse faith communities, arts work with child language brokers in schools, and life story and walking methods with refugees. Studying Diversity, Migration and Urban Multiculture is interdisciplinary in scope and includes contributions from sociologists, anthropologists and social psychologists, as well as chapters by practitioners and activists. It provides fresh perspectives on methodological debates in qualitative social research, and will be of interest to scholars, students, practitioners, activists, and policymakers who work on migration, urban diversity, conviviality and conflict, and integration and cohesion.

While French laïcité is often considered something fixed, its daily deployment is rather messy. What might we learn if we study the governance of religion from a dynamic bottom-up perspective? Using an ethnographic approach, this book examines everyday secularism in the making. How do city actors understand, frame and govern religious diversity? Which local factors play a role in those processes? In Urban Secularism: Negotiating Religious Diversity in Europe, Julia Martínez-Ariño brings the reader closer to the entrails of laïcité. She provides detailed accounts of the ways religious groups, city officials, municipal employees, secularist actors and other civil-society organisations negotiate concrete public expressions of religion. Drawing on rich empirical material, the book demonstrates that urban actors draw and (re-)produce dichotomies of inclusion and exclusion, and challenge static conceptions of laïcité and the nation. Illustrating how urban, national and international contexts interact with one another, the book provides researchers with a deeper understanding of the multilevel governance of religious diversity.

The chapters in this volume examine the racial and ethnic landscape of Britain in a contemporary era of neoliberalism and financial crisis. A key aspect of neoliberal thought is the belief that we live in a ‘post-racial’ in which the problems of racism and xenophobia have been overcome. However, cultural retrenchment and coded xenophobia have been sweeping the political terrain, accompanied by ‘new racisms’ and ‘new racial subjects’ that only close contextual analysis can unpick. The scholarship contained in this collection challenges those who suggest that we live in a post-racial time. By focusing on particular locations in Britain at a particular moment, the volume explores local stories of ‘race’ and racism across changing sociopolitical ground. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of race, racism, diaspora, multiculturalism, post-colonialism, transnationalism and post-race. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

At a time when diversity is taking an increasingly prominent place in public and academic debate, Situational Diversity offers a new perspective by understanding diversity framed in the local context, characterised through different forms of social differentiation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research on migration-driven diversity in two neighbourhoods in Stuttgart (Germany) and Glasgow (United Kingdom), the book presents a concept that takes into account the contingent and emergent nature of social differentiation while at the same time explaining the stability of modes of differentiation. The comparative approach provides a nuanced analysis of how diversity in urban environments occurs as a result of locally, socially and temporally specific practices. In this book, Klückmann discusses how social work, city administration and volunteer work prefigure positions and relations of people in the context of migration. Thus, it will appeal to students and scholars of social and cultural anthropology, European ethnology, sociology, human/cultural geography, cultural studies in addition to practitioners in the fields of intercultural relations, social and public policy as well as urban development.

In cities around the world people use a variety of public spaces to relax, to protest, to buy and sell, to experiment and to celebrate. Loose Space explores the many ways that urban residents, with creativity and determination, appropriate public space to meet their own needs and desires. Familiar or unexpected, spontaneous or planned, momentary or long-lasting, the activities that make urban space loose continue to give cities life and vitality. The book examines physical spaces and how people use them. Contributors discuss a wide range of recreational, commercial and political activities; some are conventional, others are more experimental. Some of the activities occur alongside the intended uses of planned public spaces, such as sidewalks and plazas; other activities replace former uses, as in abandoned warehouses and industrial sites. The thirteen case studies, international in scope, demonstrate the continuing richness of urban public life that is created and sustained by urbanites themselves Presents a fresh way of looking at urban public space, focusing on its positive uses and aspects. Comprises 13 detailed, well-illustrated case studies based on sustained observation and research by social scientists, architects and urban designers. Looks at a range of activities, both everyday occurrences and more unusual uses, in a variety of public spaces -- planned, leftover and abandoned. Explores the spatial and the behavioral; considers the wider historical and social context. Addresses issues of urban research, architecture, urban design and planning. Takes a broad international perspective with cases from New York, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Rome, Guadalajara, Athens, Tel Aviv, Melbourne, Bangkok, Kandy, Buffalo, and the North of England.

How can the set of rights that underpin the notion of the "right to the city" be advanced? In seeking answers to this question over several decades, social mobilizations have been assembled and new political and legal frameworks promoted. New interpretations and political articulations of the right to the city, especially those that have emerged since the end of the 2000s, encourage us to view it through the lens of identity politics. They propose that attention should be given to the diversity of the social groups that live in urban environments, whose voice and agency must be recognized in the construction of the city in the interests of equality and social justice. ​ Addressing these issues not only involves recognizing and valuing the subjects that have historically been marginalized in the construction of urban space, both physical and symbolic. It also means bearing in mind that the city materializes and is experienced in a different way by the different groups that inhabit it through their practices, uses of it and, in short, how their daily life takes shape. Advancing Urban Rights will help both concerned citizens and policy makers identify and analyze redistribution and recognition policies, institutional change, and social production of the city in an increasingly urban world.

Using Toronto as a case study, Subdivided asks how cities would function if decision-makers genuinely accounted for race, ethnicity, and class when confronting issues such as housing, policing, labor markets, and public space. With essays contributed by an array of city-builders, it proposes solutions for fully inclusive communities that respond to the complexities of a global city. Jay Pitter is a writer and professor based in Toronto. She holds a Masters in Environmental Studies from York University. John Lorinc is a Toronto-based journalist who writes about urban affairs, politics, and business. He co-edited The Ward: The Life and Loss of Toronto's First Immigrant Neighbourhood (Coach House, 2015).