Cities, Diversity and Ethnicity: Politics, governance and participation

This collection originated as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies. The chapters cover topics including diversity and urban street markets, anti-immigrant sentiments, migrant integration, and understandings of ethnic identity. They explore cities in Belgium, US, the UK, Italy, Sweden, Australia and the Netherlands.

The chapter devoted to Rye Lane, an intensely multicultural and multilingual street in Peckham, London, notes a mismatch between official documents and the lived realities witnessed through ethnographic research. Conventional planning tools may overstate deprivation and understate vitality. For instance, traditional land-use plans are not a good fit for Rye Lane, where it is common to subdivide businesses into mixed-use units. The author refers to one shop where “one can find a money remittance area run by a proprietor originally from Uganda, adjacent to a seamstress from Ghana, adjacent to a mobile phone and fabric outlet run by a proprietor from Pakistan” (page 31). This type of pattern complicates statistics about vacancy rates, turnover, etc. It also calls into question redevelopment planning that does not value diversity – either of business structures or of populations.

The chapter on the Flemish region of Belgium brings to light a different kind of misconception: that ethnic diversity is associated with opposition to immigrants. The authors’ analysis of survey data shows that the ethnic majority overestimated the diversity within Belgium; they believed non-Belgians to make up 28% of the population, while the actual figure was closer to 12%. Anti-immigrant feeling was not correlated with the actual level of ethnic diversity, but was associated with the perception of such diversity.

The misconception raised in the chapter on northeast England, meanwhile, is the idea that white people – uniquely – lack ethnic identities. The authors interviewed white social service providers in northeast England to gauge perceptions of service users’ ethnicities. The interviews showed the majority racial group’s deep discomfort with talking about ethnic matters, even though the respondents revealed a number of casual assumptions and attitudes that were based on race and ethnicity. Some respondents referred to white people as “proper” or “core” groups, for example, or conflated Britishness with whiteness. The authors posit that this sort of confusion is mirrored in, and perhaps shaped by, ambivalence in policy – in who counts as a minority community, for instance.

These are not trivial matters, as contested narratives around identity have concrete impacts: discrimination, inequality, etc. In this study, stereotyping of service seekers was seen to have impacted the ways that respondents delivered services.

Thus, these case studies show how the perceptions of publics and policymakers affect the social and economic landscape of cities. While very diverse themselves, the studies point to the fluidity of identity, in the way that ethnicity is constructed and deployed in different urban contexts.

Further reading:

Alba, Richard, Ruben G Rumbaut and Karen Marotz (2005), “A Distorted Nation: Perceptions of Racial/Ethnic Group Sizes and Attitudes Toward Immigrants and Other Minorities”, Social Forces Vol 84, No 2, pages 899–917, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2024557.

Duhl, Leonard J (1993), “Conditions for healthy cities; diversity, game boards and social entrepreneurs”, Environment and Urbanization Vol 5, No 2, pages 112–124, available at http://eau.sagepub.com/content/5/2/112.abstract.

Meissner, Fran and Steven Vertovec (2015), “Comparing super-diversity”, Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol 38, No 4, pages 541–555, available at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01419870.2015.980295?src=recsys.

Book note prepared by Christine Ro