Keywords

1 Introduction

Social scientists’ interest in diversity as an urban social phenomenon is not recent. It has been a feature of the entire history of disciplines such as urban anthropology and urban geography. What does seem relatively new, however, is the appearance and generalisation of concepts of diversity in the urban policy domain. As emphasised by Lammert and Sarkowsky (2010), diversity policy now traverses a wide variety of national and urban contexts. It is adopted and adapted to each individual context as an element of political rhetoric on diversity and multiculturalism. The transnational circulation of this notion raises the question of how it is appropriated at different geographical levels and in different socio-political systems, and how it becomes the object of negotiations or even tensions and conflicts. Understanding how it circulates also enables us to explore the constellation of socio-political actors, institutions, intermediaries, and spheres of influence involved, and more generally, taking into account the historical and geographical specifics of a given place.

At city level, the notion of diversity has also infiltrated the field of urban planning and urban project design. This worldwide trend has led to its appearing in the political agendas of urban stakeholders in the municipalities of cities in both the Global South and the northern hemisphere. Urban diversity as a policy and its management have become watchwords in urban policymaking across the globe, in varied national and urban contexts, taken up and exploited by authoritarian regimes and liberal democracies alike. From the urban planning point of view, the concept of diversity might first be thought of as referring to a city’s multiple uses (residential, commercial, leisure, etc.), but also to the diverse populations either living there or passing through, i.e., as residents or visitors.

Corporate diversity policies – and the development of ahistorical, apolitical and in fact discriminatory diversitising rhetorics – have in addition fed into diversity policies as tools of urban marketing and the legitimation of political power. The political use, even instrumentalization, of notions of diversity in promoting and legitimising urban and economic development policies and projects implies a de facto redefinition of the semantic boundaries of these terms as used in the social sciences. This raises new questions for research into relations between diversity as a locus of everyday interaction, tension, and solidarity, and diversity as circumscribed, recognised (or not), and represented in urban policies (Torino, 2021; Lejeune et al., 2021; Raco & Tasan-Kok, 2019; Steil & Delgado, 2019; Raco & Kesten, 2018; Burchardt, 2017).

Criticism of these processes of generalisation and circulation of diversity as a political paradigm, and so as a vector of the exercise of power, mostly focuses on the depoliticisation of the notion of diversity in public debate and its disconnection in urban policies from issues of socio-economic inequalities and equity.

The examples given in this chapter, drawn from cities of both the South and the North, take a critical look at policies using and promoting urban diversity through the lens of socio-economic inequalities by linking it to the notion of spatial (in) justice. The concept of spatial justice, discussed in the last section of this chapter, provides a means to bridge the gap between policies of diversity representation and management and those addressing socio-economic disparities at the urban level. Examining urban diversity through the lens of spatial justice prompts consideration of wealth distribution across geographical regions, and equitable access to vital urban resources such as housing, education, healthcare, employment, and public transportation. It provides methodologies to prioritize the challenges of equity and inequalities at the heart of urban planning and action. Moreover, urban studies employing the concept of spatial justice aim to uncover the fundamental structural mechanisms perpetuating these disparities. This approach interlinks therefore concerns of recognizing and representing diversity of groups and individuals, and efforts directed at the visibility and inclusion of marginalized groups, with issues of economic development and right to the city. In this sense, this notion refers to the relation between spatial dynamics and justice that translates into ‘the fair and equitable distribution in space of socially valued resources and the opportunities to use them’ (Soja, 2009). The nub is whether we can continue to celebrate diversity through identity and recognition policies without taking into account inhabitants’ fundamental rights, such as housing, public transport, and other social services that imply giving priority to notions of equity and spatial justice.

2 Diversity, a Fact of Urban Life

A critical, analytical approach to the concept of diversity in the urban context has always been essential to research into cities and city life. A focus on urban diversity helps us comprehend, in all their multiplicity, modes of identification and belonging, of social interaction and solidarity, but also the tensions and conflicts underlying the power relationships underpinning their interactions. Diversity is in reality just as much about conflict and tension as about coming together and negotiating. It is a fundamental fact of urban life, the essence of the city, evolving constantly in response to how near or far apart, geographically or socially, those who live in and use the city are and is itself a constituent part of it.

In line with the work of the Chicago School, a spatial approach to diversity, e.g. at the micro-level of a neighbourhood, has facilitated research into the emergence of ‘minority urban centres’ driven by dynamics of diaspora and trade and the presence of population groups with similar origins (Raulin, 2009). Nevertheless, consideration of these minority urban centres only makes analytical sense if we examine their links with the rest of society and urban space, while underlining the ‘alteration of the urban environment’ they engender through their interdependence with other social groups (ibid., p. 43). Taking into account issues of class, gender, and ethnic and racial grouping such research sheds light on the processes of re-bordering social groups undergo in different historical and geographical contexts, along with their symbolic practices, exchanges, and transactions. It also demonstrates how cities are reshaped by these practices, as well as by market forces and changes in legal and administrative frameworks and urban policies.

Recent research into links between cities, urban practices, and ‘urbanity’ has stressed the need to embed these notions within an empirical, historical framework helping to demonstrate the complexity of the interlocking of urban life and circulations, seen as the ‘interplay between spatial configurations and social practices, identities and representations, an interplay which is geared towards circulation between worlds’ (Lejeune et al., 2021, p. 4).

With the regionalisation and globalisation of migratory flow, interest in the heterogeneity of urban populations has expanded to new geographical locations beyond such ‘global cities’ as London, Paris, or New York. Research into cities of the Global South thus investigates the factors driving urban diversity at the local level against the historical background of transnational, post-colonial, and nation-state-forming processes. This enables us to carry our investigations into the national framework beyond methodological nationalism and to highlight the political and social mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion in the postcolonial contexts and the othering policies they engender, while taking into consideration various more recent forms of mobility, including the joint processes of emigration and immigration. Moreover, the study of the networks, circulations, and circuits involved helps us understand how local, translocal, national, and global scales interrelate in the production of localities in the material and legal environment of a given city, reminding us that the categories of local and global are co-constitutive and that ‘globalisation is always a localisation process’ (Cağlar & Glick Schiller, 2015, pp. 4–5).

Loren Landau’s chapter in this book illustrates, via his research into the cities of Sub-Saharan Africa, the importance of informal practices and forms of mobility in the production of urban space beyond the scope of the state and local authorities. The spatialisation of these informal phenomena in the urban environment muddies the field of urban politics and policymaking, leading to the emergence of informal regulatory regimes. Meanwhile, the intensity and multiplicity of residents’ mobilities between specific points in the city engender translocal dynamics unthought-of and un-considered in conventional urban policies. As a result, as Landau explains, city-dwellers lose interest in participating in official policymaking. This focus on the informal highlights the need to consider the history of state and local authority actions in relation to how urban services are patronised at the local level – the analysis of which is essential to our understanding of the urban. Examination of these informal dynamics, and of how cities and places are interrelated horizontally, leads to the emergence of

alternative urban cartographies with disconnections between neighbours and municipal institutions, but vibrant conduits between a Nairobi street corner and a village in Somalia and a mosque in Minnesota. It may connect a small shop in Johannesburg to a political party in Kinshasa or a farmers’ cooperative or chamber of commerce in Mozambique (Landau, Chapter 2).

In terms of research methodology, this also implies researchers must take a historically-informed approach, possess the right cultural and linguistic skills, and understand the cultural affinities and tensions in play – i.e., take an approach that is embedded in the cultural area in which the key methods are multi-sited ethnographic research and research into heterogenous populations in a given space. The embedding of cultural studies in ethnographical work on diversity highlights the need for a long-term perspective, rejecting the idea of cultural diversity as an ahistorical phenomenon, whose legitimacy is limited to its recent, ubiquitous presence in the spheres of power and policymaking.

Linked to the concept of diversity, that of cosmopolitanism – viewed as a social condition of meeting and interaction – puts greater emphasis on the normative dimension of politically-driven equality and inclusion projects. Considerable research has, however, also attempted to illustrate its practically-grounded empirical side by broadening its scope to bottom-up social phenomena—a kind of ‘situated cosmopolitanism’ (Baas et al., 2020; Lejeune et al., 2021; Werbner, 2008). However, between normative preoccupations and its ability to account for social interactions in urban space characterised by logics of exclusion and social inequalities, the ambivalence of the notion of cosmopolitanism raises many questions as to its heuristic capacity to account for power relations and questions relating to social inequalities and socio-spatial justice. Craig Calhoun (2008, p. 113) argues that

cosmopolitanism becomes richer and stronger if approached in terms of connections rather than (or in addition to) equivalence. And cosmopolitans who think in terms of connections – and their incompleteness and partiality – are less likely to turn a blind eye to the material inequalities that shape the ways in which different people can belong to specific groups while still inhabiting the world as a whole.

Criticism of cosmopolitanism as an analytical concept argues that such research, often focusing on identity politics in relation to practices of consumption or strategies of belonging, neglects the issue of socio-spatial justice. They are seen as underestimating the economic and political mechanisms that reproduce inequalities and impact the material conditions of a city’s inhabitants – for example their access to urban resources such as housing.

Some empirical research, bringing the concepts of diversity or cosmopolitanism into play, has paradoxically demonstrated, by taking an ethnographical approach, the difficulties involved in adopting them as an analytical framework. For example, Hélène le Bail and Marylène Lieber (2021) have shown how in some gentrifying neighbourhoods of Paris, such as Belleville, where diversity rhetoric is used to give legitimacy to urban regeneration policies, the demands of Chinese sex-workers in the neighbourhood for acceptance and protection have challenged the limits of diversity policies at local level. In this particular context, the authors explain, while policies supposedly promoting urban diversity focus mainly on public safety, the presence of the educated middle class, and the promotion of ethnic forms of consumption, the political tendency is above all to eliminate sex workers or render them invisible in the public space instead of combating the violence they are victims of within it. In this context, the authors forcefully demonstrate the autonomy of the social field and agency of social actors and their ability to subvert and challenge official diversity policies by contesting their geographical, legal, and moral boundaries.

In this sense, the popularity of diversity as a concept deployed in urban policies and governance redefines de facto the research questions raised in ethnographic work on diversity as an urban fact: diversity management policies have their impact on city-dwellers’ urban experiences – framing them, categorising them, prioritising them, financing them or, on the contrary, devaluing and concealing them, according to political agendas in each particular context. These policies inevitably interact with the modes of legitimation and appropriation of practices and identities in the urban space, whether involving migrants or not, and more importantly with the modes of access to the resources that cities offer.

By analysing the interrelationship between diversity experienced as an urban and social reality and diversity as understood in the various fields of political action, we can now apprehend a form of governmentality of diversity that demonstrates the dialectical relations between the political and administrative fields and individual and collective urban practices of diversity. This approach considers diversity policies not only as a response to diversity as an urban and social fact, but considers their role, particularly through the classification and enforcement of categories, in relation to diversity as understood and interpreted by the inhabitants themselves (Burchardt & Höhne, 2015; Burchardt, 2017).The widespread appropriation, even trivialisation, of concepts such as diversity complicate their use in the scientific field, which by defining and redefining them endeavours to preserve their heuristic value. It may actually be feared that their excessive use in the different spheres of influence involved may render them obsolete in the scientific arena.

3 Urban Diversity as Policy in Circulation

In the boarding jetways of airports in major cities around the world, HSBC has posted billboards bearing the message: ‘Difference. The only thing we all have in common’, alongside images of birds of various sizes and colours sitting on different-level wires. The subheading, in small print, reads ‘We strive to create a workplace where diversity thrives – it’s in our DNA. Together we thrive’. The use of these concepts by this global banking institution, implicated in a number of money-laundering cases, illustrates how they have been appropriated by varied institutions whose objectives are sometimes far from targeting issues of social inequality and exclusion. Diversity now features on the agenda of many companies and institutions, multinationals, museums, universities, and municipalities in the countries and cities of both the Global North and the Global South. Levels of diversity in such institutions are regularly monitored and audited by human resources departments, based for example on the national, racial, or ethnic origin of the employees or the artists on display. The generalisation of diversity in human resources strategy raises questions as to the actual effect it may have on the structural social inequalities produced and reproduced via the unequal historical and circumstantial power relations to which some of these institutions, such as banks, have made a significant contribution.

How did a concept such as diversity – which theoretically should carry with it notions of equity, justice, and democracy – come to be compatible with (neoliberal) policies reinforcing social inequalities or feature in the urban policies of authoritarian/undemocratic regimes? This question first draws our attention to the modes of circulation of this notion in distinct contexts, then to how it has been appropriated and used in various fields of activities such as educational, cultural, and urban. The interconnections between these fields (e.g. between the artistic and the urban) as far as the concept of diversity is concerned also offer insights into the mechanisms that allow differentiated and sometimes depoliticised uses of it. And finally, the widespread circulation and deployment of the concept of diversity as a legitimating factor also raises the issues of the power it confers on institutional actors at different levels, for instance, when cities seek to promote themselves as being among the ranks of the global metropolis and exploit registers of diversity to this end.

With respect to cities, the concepts of diversity and urban diversity were present in the early days of liberal economic thought as necessary conditions of the market, starting with Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, in which cities are seen as spaces facilitating the interaction of merchants and the movement of goods and capital. They would become the main nodes of social progress and market development (Vormann, 2015). Indeed, the celebration of diversity in urban planning and city planning is closely related to this vision of diversity’s role in the urban economy. In the terminology of urban planners, diversity refers primarily to the mix of urban purposes and uses (commercial, residential, leisure, etc.) to which has been added the social and cultural diversity of users and inhabitants. In urban thinking, since the end of World War II, it appears as a potential aid in correcting the errors of the past in response to criticism of the great modernist ‘ideal city’ visions (themselves a response to the congestion of the industrial city) of the pre-war period. The latter, by imposing a top-down model, attempted to offer rationalistic solutions to all social issues through a form of urban engineering. Faced with the homogenising processes of the modern city, the defenders of diversity criticised its rationalistic reorganisation and homogenisation by promoting, first, the practice of urban conservation, followed by the inclusion of recreational, artistic, and festive activities in city planning. The diversity of urban functions joined social diversity in visions of the city of the future, which, aware of its history and heritage, would acknowledge its organic development from the bottom up.

Jane Jacobs (1992, p. 4) is probably one of the best-known advocates of this trend.

She emphasised the need for cities to integrate the diversity of economic and social uses at the urban level, stressing the importance of the diversity of the built environment (the type, function, age, and uses of buildings), which would shape interactively economic, social, and cultural diversity. These physical and functional characteristics become the ‘natural generators of diversity and prolific incubators of new enterprises and ideas of all kinds (ibid., 145). From this point of view, diversity is generated by the market but also by the ordinary life of inhabitants with diverse social and cultural backgrounds. As Boris Vorman (2015, p. 123) explains,

For Jacobs diversity is a supreme good because it accounts for difference, systemic complexity, spontaneity and individual needs and desires…It is unnecessary to belabour the point that Jacobs orients her critique against modernist planning ideals and, for this reason alone, her argumentation in favour of more diversity harbours strong affinities with neoliberal discourses against the state.

The state’s retreat from urban planning is defended by this vision of the diverse city, counting on ‘forces of self-diversification’ for the simultaneous development of the market and democracy. Flexibility and diversity would thus sketch new outlines for the urban vision, to the detriment of planners and a vision imposed top down. Oddly – though in fact consistently with this idea of diversity – according to Jacobs, neighbourhoods with a majority of African Americans and Latinos, such as the Bronx and Harlem in New York or Boston’s Roxbury, lacked diversity and vitality, whereas she praises neighbourhoods such as the West Village.

Jacobs lays the blame on the built environment. She hardly mentions the systematic discrimination in housing, lending, education, and employment of the time (Steil & Delgado, 2019, p. 40).

Diversity has thus gradually become a ‘planning orthodoxy’ (Fainstein, 2005) and is now considered ‘both as a new urban condition and a desirable outcome of urban development’ (Vormann, 2015), relying on the development of the market and the circulation of capital and individuals (including migrants and foreign labour) to generate cultural diversity in a virtuous circle. Based on these premises, the concept of diversity has travelled and become a ubiquitous feature of the political agendas of municipalities in cities of the South and the North, in liberal democracies as well as in authoritarian contexts.

To better understand how these ideas and policies circulate, Peggy Levitt (2016) proposes, on the theme of cultural circulations, the concept of ‘vernacularisation’. The matrix proposed by Levitt takes into account the positionality of the stakeholders involved, their social embeddedness in a specific context and field of practice, and their situatedness across geographical and power hierarchies. She also adds that it is important to consider their objectives, their aspirations, and the modes of communication they adopt. This holistic approach also takes a long-term perspective that considers the history of local institutions in an urban context. These elements together are seen as helping a group of ideas become intelligible in a given context, transformed according to local circumstances and adopted in new action plans:

The added value of vernacularisation, therefore, is to combine under one conceptual umbrella the separate but interdependent ways in which the social and spatial status of actors, processes of communication, the subsequent re-articulation of aspirations and goals, and time affect how policies circulate and are implemented (Levitt, 2020, p. 759).

This therefore means understanding how these diversity policy assemblages circulate over widely diverse geographical areas and are translated and put into practice in each local context, with the mediation, notably, of various categories of stakeholders in one or more fields of practice. The notion of policy assemblage is understood here as ‘relational constructs, comprised of heterogeneous and emergent component parts that are arranged together towards certain strategic ends, in particular spaces and time’ (Savage, 2020, 319).

Such an understanding of how policies are vernacularised stresses the multi-scalar positioning of cities, which, as explained by Çaglar and Glick-Schiller (Çaglar & Glick-Schiller, 2018), corresponds not only to the static geographical scales of local to global or large, small, or medium-sized cities, but is concerned with relative power and interdependence as structured across scales. Analysis of the distinct but interconnected fields of the urban thus helps us grasp the positioning of cities (ibid.). The idea is, rather than looking for what is identical, to look at what is new about a phenomenon that has circulated and been transformed. Using a multi-scalar approach to the circulation of urban diversity policies leads us to investigate the repertoires of meaning in play, the multiplicity of actors, the involvement and evolution of those spheres of influence contributing to the development of diversity rhetorics, and how urban diversity policies materialise via urban projects.

Comparing Doha and Singapore, Jérémie Molho’s chapter in this book shows how the transnational circulation of policy ideas feeds into local diversity policies. Molho presents critical literature linking the politics of governance and representation of urban diversity to neoliberal policies, underlining their cooptation by the latter. But he also reviews literature on ‘progressive modelling’, emphasising efforts made by cities and civil society to create networks of solidarity by mobilising repertoires of diversity and inclusion. Taking an empirical approach to the cities scrutinised, Doha and Singapore, he highlights the emergence of another type of policy modelling: compartmentalised diversity governance. By defining the characteristics of the latter model, he demonstrates the contradictions and inconsistencies of diversity rhetorics and policies.

The multi-scalar nature of urban diversity policies, understood in terms of differentiated power relations and the multiplicity of stakes and stakeholders involved leads, according to Molho, to this compartmentalised diversity governance, which makes no attempt, when deployed, to fully comprehend diversity. This results in the progressive agenda of these policies being limited de facto to certain categories of the population, targeting in particular the urban elites. Molho rightly points out the shortcomings of this type of consensual governance in the face of crisis situations such as the Covid-19 pandemic, which led Doha and Singapore to confine migrant workers to overcrowded dormitories and camps lacking basic living services. These contradictions and inadequacies in urban diversity governance policies reveal a disconnect between this type of policy and social policies (or social programming) aimed at implementing sustainable infrastructures for the most fragile communities. Thus, it may be a question of whether this form of compartmentalised governance is an unintended consequence of the paradoxes and contradictions of such policy modelling, and therefore a result of the interaction between politics and policies of diversity management, or whether it refers to an explicit type of governance of diversity. Is this form of compartmentalisation not an illustration of neoliberal approaches as, precisely, a technology (Rose, 1999; Roy & Ong, 2011) or a tool that can be adapted or modelled in various contexts, in authoritarian regimes as well as in liberal democracies?

Raco and Kesten (2018), in their research into urban diversity policies in London, argue that the pragmatic, even consensual, use of urban diversity as policy should be understood through the synchronous, multiple dynamics of politicisation of the term in different contexts. Referring to Latour’s (2007, p. 815) definition of politics and politicisation as a way of looking ‘around the issues instead of having the issues enter into a ready-made political sphere’, the authors suggest we should consider politicisation as a process that revolves around power relations and resource allocation strategies based on different temporalities of a given context. This enables us, they explain, to explore not only how political agendas regarding diversity have been elaborated, but also understand the positionality of those implementing them, along with their aims, often focused on economic growth, the development of a modern creative urban culture, and global competition. Diversity policies incorporating these objectives have, in London in particular, facilitated the access of foreign investors to urban space and the adoption by local institutions of ‘diversity-aware’ human resource strategies for the recruitment of qualified people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, in line with selective immigration of talents, to bolster London’s global competitiveness (ibid.).

In some contexts, so-called inclusive rhetoric and policies on the reception of migrants at the national level may translate into quite different results at city level, or even at the level of individual neighbourhoods or municipalities within a single city. For example, in Turkey the welcoming of Syrian migrants is often justified by the state in religious terms and values with reference to Muslim solidarity or historical ones recalling the Ottoman Empire’s glorious cosmopolitan past, while at local level, the geopolitical implications of Turkey’s hosting policy remain invisible (Danış & Nazlı, 2019). However, how migrants’ and refugees’ presence is perceived and accepted varies widely from one district to another within Istanbul, depending on their emplacement, as a processual concept that ‘links together space, place, and power’ (Cağlar & Glick Schiller, 2015, pp. 4–5).

These differences, and the distinct ways diversity rhetoric and policies are deployed, remind us that the socio-spatial and historical characteristics of municipalities within a city must also be taken into consideration. Also, as decentralisation policies give cities and their municipalities more autonomy to join networks sharing urban practices and policies at the supranational level, the vernacularisation of diversity policies at municipality level may be observed in a variety of forms within a single city. In this framework, emplacement helps explain how diversity is translated locally and implemented as policy vis-à-vis other municipalities in the city, but also vis-à-vis peers within a network of municipalities at regional or global levels, such as networks that bring together European or Middle Eastern cities. Ceren Say and Özkul (2020) explored the differing ways the idea of diversity was interpreted and applied in three Istanbul municipalities: Beyoğlu, Beşiktaş and Fatih, depending, on the one hand, on their socio-political and historical location within the city, and on the other, their participation in transnational networks of urban players. They concluded that the identification of beneficiaries of diversity policies under the label of ‘disadvantaged groups’ corresponded to a distinct form of categorisation in each neighbourhood that was not necessarily inclusive of new migrant groups arriving there, such as Syrians, but took in ethnic and religious minorities with a history dating back to the Ottoman Empire, or domestic migrants. In some Istanbul neighbourhoods, such as Tarlabaşı, undergoing urban renewal projects and aggressive gentrification via foreign investment in luxury real estate projects, the eviction and dispossession of migrants, including domestic migrants such as Kurds or transgender people, stands in stark contrast to political rhetoric on diversity and the welcoming of migrants elsewhere in the city.

Ironically, the same neo-Ottoman rhetoric celebrating the city’s ancient traditions of diversity to support the reception of refugees in the outlying district of Sultanbeyli, based on a particular form of alliance between state actors and civil society (Danış & Nazlı, 2019), feeds into the marketing and promotional strategies of the central district of Tarlabaşı. Here, in the name of a new cosmopolitanism, these advertising slogans and representations – and the urban and residential projects they promote – contribute above all to the gradual displacement, even eviction, of residents such as Iranian or Syrian migrants of modest economic means or domestic migrants such as the Kurds who have settled in the neighbourhood since the 1990s.

This commodification of ethnic differences in urban projects is seen as contributing to a form of ‘urban governmentality of multiculturalism’ which, according to Torino (2021, p. 710), becomes ‘an apparatus postulated on the financialisation of culture, people, and land through which neoliberal urban planning regulates “diversity” in space’. By analysing the relationship between multi-ethnicity, neoliberalism, urban planning, and racism in Bogotá, Torino has shown how the recent nationwide recognition of the multicultural nature of Colombian society has mostly translated, in the capital Bogotá, into multicultural branding strategies without feeding into more just forms of urban planning focused on issues of equity and the material conditions of Afro-Colombian communities in terms of access to health services, education, and housing. Instead, Bogotá’s multicultural policies are limited to specific areas of the city where capital or government and educational institutions are concentrated. In Bogotá, as in many other cities, diversity serves to flatten out the historical specificities of ethnic communities and the structural inequalities that characterise some of them in favour of a more generic promotion of ‘cultural diversity’.

4 The Arts, the ‘Creative Classes’, and Urban Diversity

Among the ‘compartments’ of this form of governance of urban diversity, to use Jeremie Molho’s terminology in this book, the instrumentalisation of culture and the arts and the ‘visibilisation’, promotion, and mobilisation of the ‘creative classes’ are indicative of the selective, if not discriminatory, mechanisms at work in the politics of diversity representation and governance. The cultural and arts sectors make up one of the registers of development and urban regeneration projects now nearly omnipresent in cities of the South and North. They have the capacity to deploy a rhetoric of diversity while contributing to market development and, in some cases, to processes of nation-building. An aesthetic of difference emerges from the meeting of these two fields of practice, the urban and the cultural, which often tends to underestimate issues of equity and social inequality. In several cities of the Global South, such as Beirut, Tehran, or Dubai (if Dubai may indeed be considered as such!), both public authorities and the transnational elites involved in projects to develop local art scenes and markets frequently adopt nationalist developmentalist rhetorics. They undertake efforts to internationalise the local scene within a given urban framework, materialised through various forms of cultural neighbourhoods and events (Moghadam, 2021a). These projects and transnational elites thus contribute to both the process of nation-state building and to that of capitalistic market expansion.

In this respect, urban entrepreneurialism (Harvey, 2001), which sees culture as a key urban development tool, also reconfigures the role of public and private stakeholders in defining cultural policy and managing the relevant urban spaces, ultimately legitimating their contribution to regional planning and (often the absence of) redistributive policies (Brones & Moghadam, 2017b). David Harvey sees their integration within the capitalist economy as being based on each city exploiting its own ‘monopoly rents,’ which enable it to highlight what distinguishes it from others and turn it to profit. He postulates that if ‘a monopoly rent is always the object of capitalist desire, the means of gaining it through interventions in the field of culture, history, heritage, aesthetics and meanings must necessarily be of a great import for capitalists of any sort’ (Harvey, 2001, p. 409).

In these terms, the cultural and social diversity of some cities becomes another type of rent, and the ‘diversitisation’ of urban policies through the aesthetics of difference becomes one compartment among others of broader policies now cosily wedding globalism and nationalism (Moghadam 2021a). For example, in our own research into art districts in Dubai and Beirut, we have shown the disconnect from, and marginal impact of, these projects on their immediate environment, as seen in the lack of infrastructure and housing for disadvantaged populations or foreign labour camps (Brones & Moghadam, 2017a). In these contexts, the rise of the new urban elites driving these projects is connected with the emergence of new spheres of influence and cosmopolitan spaces and sociabilities in which art plays a key role. Coexistence between locals and newcomers may foster urban connections characterised by novel uses and rhythms counter to the predominant lifestyles. However, such spaces remain socially disconnected from their immediate urban environment, owing both to how they are incorporated into the urban fabric and their outward-looking nature as participants in regional and global artistic networks.

The cultural field has thus become a promising arena for the flourishing of diversity rhetoric, even the staging of urban diversity, in political contexts strongly marked, in some cases, by exclusionary politics and spatial segregation. The close association of diversity with urban growth and consumption practices may be seen as explaining its circulation in various political and social contexts, including the political agendas of the (often neoliberal) governance of cities located in illiberal political contexts. However, as explained earlier, understanding these processes of local appropriation of diversity as a mode of governance must take into consideration the local and historical specificities of a given context, which are themselves rooted in the complex relationships between a colonial past, the formation of the nation-state and its political economy, urbanisation, and often of a transnational history of population movements marked by successive phases of settlement in a given urban context.

In Dubai, for instance, where non-nationals represent over 200 nationalities and make up approximately more than 90% of the city-state, I explored how the arts sector is used to portray and talk about the city’s diversity despite the non-integrative and exclusionary migration and citizenship policies found there (Moghadam 2021b). In fact, over the past few years the Emirati authorities have elaborated a new official discourse on diversity and inclusion, bringing into play such terms as ‘tolerance’ or ‘happiness’. In this context, these notions of tolerance and happiness are closely associated with efforts to establish connections with other national and international scenes and promote globalising cultural and artistic practices rather than acknowledge the historical transnational past of the country or grant rights to migrants.

As a result, entire communities, for example Iranian or Yemeni whose presence predates the creation of the UAE, have been systematically overlooked (even though some are now naturalised Emirati). In contrast, by appropriating new spheres of influence, such as contemporary art, these diversity representation policies aim to bolster the legitimacy of the political elite and their social recognition at national, regional, and global levels. This trend has resulted in the adoption of an aesthetic of difference disconnected from any granting of political rights to migrants or civic recognition and translates spatially into the emergence of cosmopolitan urban enclaves that participate, translocally (i.e., through local-to-local connections across national boundaries) in a worldwide network of similar spaces, home to exclusive social groupings.

5 Urban Diversity and Spatial Justice: An Approach through Infrastructure

Criticism of consensual, even performative, urban diversity policies embedded in a capitalistic vision of economic growth underlines the need to link these questions to the issue of structural inequalities to envisage a diverse, but above all just, city. As Susan S. Fainstein (2005) points out, the relationship between diversity and tolerance is not direct and the cohabitation of individuals and groups in a given space does not necessarily generate greater acceptability, especially in a context of growing inequalities, e.g. in terms of access to a city’s resources. Similarly, recognition policies might lead to recognition conflicts between groups, each seeking to strengthen its social legitimacy in line with political agendas on diversity.

Thanks to the conjunction of postmodern intersectional approaches and the analysis of spatial justice in Marxist-oriented critical urban studies, with their emphasis on class, diversity has become an integral component of debate on justice in the city. This conjunction provides normative and empirical frameworks for questioning the effectiveness of diversity policies by bringing into the debate the mechanisms involved in (re)producing socio-spatial inequalities. In line with the different disciplinary approaches (geography, philosophy, and urban planning) of David Harvey and, later, of Iris Marion Young, Susan S. Fainstein, and Edward Soja, empirical and normative studies of spatial justice demonstrate the institutional, economic, and procedural processes that generate and perpetuate socio-spatial inequalities, as for example in the housing sector.

Postmodern approaches have led to the consideration of the heterogeneity of the urban and the plurality of identities found where ethnic, racial, and gender groups intersect, insisting on the potential of social struggles and other movements to repoliticise the notion of urban governance and looking beyond the posturing of institutional players, which fail to take into account relations of power (Quentin & Morange, 2018; Steil & Delgado, 2019). These latter approaches also show the limits of liberal distributive policies seeking to correct the negative and unequal effects of the dominant capitalist system without actually attacking the foundations of its reproductive mechanisms.

Among epistemological approaches aimed at highlighting links between issues of spatial justice and diversity, an approach emphasising the role of infrastructures seems to respond to these material concerns. From this perspective, ‘material infrastructure formations’ – transport systems, housing, energy and water supplies, or architectural formations – become and produce at the same time socio-spatial expressions of difference in the city. ‘They have to be addressed as sociomaterial assemblages, linking administrative practices, knowledge, resources and policies, thereby incorporating normative ideas, ideal subject formations and specific modes of placemaking’ (Burchardt & Höhne, 2015, p. 2). Analysis of the role of materialities and technologies thus becomes another way to approach the issue of urban diversity. For example, joint analysis of the institutional processes and rhetoric that lead to the creation of public spaces in a city, and lived experiences within them, may reveal the paradoxes and contradictions that this type of space can embody in urban planning when associated with the idea of enhancing urban diversity (Kyriazis et al., 2021).

In Toronto, where diversity is celebrated constantly, with ‘Diversity our Strength’ as the city’s motto, the normalisation of diversity in policy rhetoric seems paradoxically to lead to a form of instrumentalisation of diversity that overlooks systemic inequalities (Özogul & Tasan-Kok, 2017) and reinforces the stigmatisation of racialised neighbourhoods (Ahmadi, 2018). In this context, housing conditions may serve as a key indicator to help question diversity curation policies that take a managerial approach to promoting the external and internal perceptions of a city’s diversity, while underestimating the growing material inequalities that result from dynamics of socio-spatial polarisation and poverty (Raco & Taşan-Kok, 2020). While, Toronto, for example, boasts a high level of diversity, spatial segregation is intensifying according to racial and ethnic characteristics and income levels, resulting in the inner city’s relative homogenisation in terms of household income and the pauperisation of some of the outskirts (Hulchanski, 2019; Dinca-Panaitescu & Walks, 2015; Hulchanski, 2010). Similarly, federal policies encouraging home ownership and access to mortgages have resulted in high levels of household debt – higher among immigrant communities than among those born in Canada (Simone & Walks, 2019). These kinds of ‘financial inclusion’ policies, Walks and Simone claim, may lead to the exclusion and social disintegration of migrants, particularly newcomers (ibid., p. 297):

Such high debt-to-income ratios [in particular immigrant-reception suburban areas] not only portend increased spatial vulnerability to various ‘shocks’ (interest rate increases, job losses), but even in their absence they portend lower discretionary spending and investment relative to neighbourhoods with less leverage, and thus to the restructuring and filtering down of more indebted neighbourhoods. To the degree that concentrations of debt vulnerabilities are related to concentrations of particular immigrant groups who, as a result of the timing of their entry to Canada, disproportionately took advantage of federal policies enhancing their mortgage access in times of rising house prices, it is possible that the places where they are concentrated could become stigmatised, and the groups themselves potentially blamed for the very filtering resulting from their lack of discretionary incomes (e.g. for not sufficiently maintaining their properties like older generations did, etc.).

Indeed, in the absence of credit lines and adequate incomes among many newcomers in Canada, numerous households have resorted to secondary lenders offering variable interest rates. During the recent period of inflation in 2022, this has exposed them to rising interest rates and falling real estate prices, to considerable economic and social vulnerability, and in some cases to the loss of their properties, even including down-payments made when applying for mortgages. These forms of economic precarity, generated where migration and housing policies intersect, directly affect the quality of migrants’ trajectories, their perception of diversity and justice in the city, their family relationships, their modes of sociability and, ultimately, how they integrate in their new living environment (object of the author’s current research among Iranian immigrants in Toronto).

More broadly, the perceived connection, whether factual or imagined, between the housing crisis in Canadian cities in 2023, with the increased number of immigrants primarily underscores how the reception of immigrants can be impacted by deficient social policies and the vision for an equitable city. This crisis predominantly stems from the ascent of neoliberal urban policies and growing income inequality since the 1980s, coupled with the absence, or at best, the inadequacy of social housing policies spanning from that era to the present (Keil, 2002; Walks, 2009). Consequently, it has exacerbated social disparities within the housing sector, significantly affecting not only the actual integration of immigrants in major Canadian urban centers, but also directly moulding the perception of immigration in the country.

In the same Canadian context, but also elsewhere in the world, feminist geographers, drawing on work that focuses first and foremost on the political economy of cities, have proposed gendered approaches to the city in order to address the issue of spatial justice and access to the city’s resources. These approaches have highlighted the consequences of the transformation of the welfare state and the strengthening of neo-liberalized public policies, and the socio-economic inequalities that have resulted in relation to the multiple, gendered identities of the inhabitants, and the way in which these have translated into space. Above all, these studies have demonstrated the agency of the social movements of women and LGBTQ communities, including immigrants and newcomers, their ability to combat inequalities and their contribution to urban vitality. (Wekerle, 2014; Klodawsky et al., 2017).

Thus the approach that studies infrastructures as socio-cultural and political formations, allows us to examine systematically the politics of diversity; to ensure that class remains present in debates where gender, ethnic, and racial groups intersect; and to explore the productive and reproductive mechanisms of social inequalities while grasping their historical depth in a given context, i.e., by taking seriously cultural, historical, and geographical contingencies.

6 Concluding Remarks

The circulation, vernacularisation, and now omnipresence of diversity in urban policies in the cities of the South and the North should encourage urban research to question its very ubiquity. For if the globalisation of urban norms and models and the professional mobility of urban experts and expertise have led to similar terminologies and outlooks showing up in policies in widely varying urban contexts, they are above all anchored in, and produced through, specific sets of historical, political, and social relationships. It is thus essential to consider history, and this anchoring in a specific cultural area, to comprehend a notion such as urban diversity that circulates around the globe. At the same time, a relational approach to space allows us to take into account the processes of circulation, appropriation, and emplacement a notion undergoes, looking at systems of social and political actors at various geographical levels, their interlocking in unequal power relations, and how they contribute to the production of one space in relation to others. If diversity has become the buzzword of urban policies, it is up to critical urban research to ask ‘Diversity: should we want it?’ (Fainstein, 2005) and if so, what are the conditions for achieving it, what are the links between diversity as experienced by residents on a daily basis and diversity as framed by urban governance, with forms of categorisation informed by the joint processes of inclusion and exclusion.

Without aiming to denigrate recognition policies, this chapter – drawing on the vast critical urban literature with its central focus on socio-spatial justice – has proposed that the study of the urban politics of diversity must systematically take into account the mechanisms underpinning the reproduction of socio-spatial inequalities.

Numerous examples from cities in the South and the North have shown how the term diversity can be used to formulate consensual urban policies whose leitmotif remains economic growth, international visibility as a diverse city, and now as a product of choice for sale on the ‘city market’. In this sense, analysis of the concept of urban diversity and its circulation in the policy arena can only with the greatest difficulty be dissociated from that of class and the modes of capital formation and circulation. This puts into proper perspective struggles over the appropriation of resources, identity issues, and the de facto diversity of urban space with that envisioned by urban governance, and so reveals the mechanisms that perpetuate forms of socio-spatial injustice. Finally, as emphasised by Quentin and Morange (2018, p. 1), when justice is placed at the centre of urban thought, it becomes essential for researchers to base their critique on a value judgement of the situations observed by making an epistemological choice that rejects ‘the twofold illusion of axiological neutrality and of scientific objectivity’.