Planning in the multicultural city: Celebrating diversity or reinforcing difference?

Even as multiculturalism is condemned as a failure by national leaders in a number of countries, urban residents live successfully in cities of ethnic and racialized difference. This paper conducts a descriptive review, drawing on the contemporary English language literature, of the manner in which planning engages with multiculturalism in cities. Its geographical scope is international; having said that, in order to make a coherent discussion it focuses on eight cities, selected both for their ethnic and racialized diversity and for their situation within different national governance structures and different policy histories in relation to migration. Our overall argument is that planning and planners are presently engaging with the demographic reality of multiculturalism in the city through three major interventions: social mix planning in housing, planning for the commodification of diversity in ethnically identified businesses, and planning for public spaces and encounter. We begin by examining various understandings of multiculturalism – as a political philosophy, a policy framework, and a demographic reality – that are mobilized in cities with diverse government arrangements and histories of migration. Through a discussion of social mix, we proceed to assess the ways that urban planning has tried to ‘manage’ social difference in situations where difference has been interpreted as disorderly and in which it has been associated with disadvantage. We then consider how the multicultural features of some cities have been commodified, their diversity packaged to form showpieces for tourists and/or gentrifiers in ways which sometimes fail to consider the viability of housing and small businesses for longstanding residents and businesspeople. Finally, we investigate public spaces and facilities, discussing their regulation by planning and the conflicts that can ensue when spaces and facilities are claimed by some ethnic groups to the exclusion of others even as planners seek to promote intercultural awareness and encounter. Interrogating the involvement of planning in either celebrating diversity or reinforcing difference, we conclude that planning produces both outcomes, often simultaneously, but that its inclination over many decades to control forms of diversity that have been regarded as unruly has reinforced difference in cities. Accordingly, we propose that the construction of everyday multiculturalisms is the task of inhabitants as well as planners. Furthermore, positioning planners so that they are more effective, creative and visible in their engagement with ethnic and racialized difference in the contemporary neoliberal city should be a priority.