Humans are social beings who need interaction for survival but today, our societies are inventing some threats that could reduce social interaction. A risk-averse culture is creating conditions around life in public domains and cities that promote a “no culture”, which determines how urban space looks, feels, works and how we behave in it. As a consequence, many choose to isolate themselves in gated estates or ghettoes. Equally, increasing numbers of social relationships are migrating to virtual worlds, avoiding face to face interactions.

This book advocates for more direct communication in cities. As the authors claim, only when we realize that we still live side by side will we foster empathy by learning more of each other and reducing the distrust about social and cultural difference. But communication across cultures does not come naturally. The large majority of people prefer to live in a comfort area of predictability, without taking the risk (real or imagined) of intercultural interaction. The book discusses these fears and analyzes some ways of solving them. Although the greater the cultural difference the more chance for misinterpretation and conflict, our current globalizing cities are increasingly making us live together in closer proximity. Thus, policy challenges should rest on how to proactively manage the potential (or actual) conflicts, by acknowledging the types of problems that proximity creates, such as fear or pre-judging people, and then to deal with them in a direct way that does not put down the argument in favour of interaction.

Two conflictive antipodes lie in the intercultural debate in today’s cities. The first is fundamentalism, not only in its religious manifestations but also in economic terms (i.e. neoliberalism and its pervasive market-based rules of engagement). The second is secularism, not in normative, westernized approaches to modern rationality, but understood as the right of societies to be ruled by logical thought and evidence instead of faith-based principles. A well-understood secularism is core to encouraging multicultural urban societies successfully, because secularism acts through:

· providing settings for a continually renewing dialogue across differences, cultures and conflicts;
· allowing strongly held beliefs or faiths expression within this core agreement; and
· acknowledging the “naturalness” of conflict and establishing means and mediation devices to deal with difference.

The book also transforms the usually taken-for-granted approach to cultural “diversity as a deficit” into a more optimistic conceptualization of “diversity as an advantage”, an opportunity to build more cohesive societies. Chapter 1 establishes basic terminology, also conceptualizing hierarchies and sociological categorizations. Chapter 2 provides historical and current evidence in favour of cultural diversity as being beneficial to urban life and socioeconomic development. Chapter 3 explores forms of exclusion and sociospatial segregation in several historical cities, while Chapter 4 revisits history exactly in the opposite way, by exploring the evidence of successful cities as intercultural milieus, from ancient to modern metropolises. Chapter 5 addresses the many forms of sociocultural interaction in the post-modern society and how they are reproduced in its institutions. Chapter 6 presents the concept of “hybridity” as key driver for cultural and economic innovation. Chapters 7 to 9 analyze the city as a proactive milieu for a new intercultural kind of citizenship, also providing ways to measure it. Finally, Chapter 10 provides conclusions and recommends the recognition of a new kind of ecology and a new kind of civics in our increasingly intercultural cities.