Living With Difference – Interventions for Just Cities

Abstract

Most cities, including small and medium ones, experience diverse multicultural populations. The sustainability of such diverse cities requires them to be capable of living with differences and diversity without producing new social inequalities and sustaining old ones. We argue that there is a need for a new conceptualization with which to approach cultural diversity, differences and similarities in urban planning, in line with Gressgård and Jensens’ (2016) quest to understand the relationship between migrants and cities. This special issue analyzes several initiatives aiming at facilitating encounters and creating urban spaces for cross-cultural interaction, participation, and dialogue. The articles stem from the research project Sustainable diverse cities: Innovation in integration (Cit-egration), 1 which explores the role of various initiatives to create spaces of co-existence and interaction across differences and to develop new concepts and understandings of just cities. The contributing articles share the understanding that diverse cities consist of and benefit from a multitude of encounters. The articles present analyses based on initiatives and activities in the small- and medium-sized cities Bodø and Tromsø in Norway and Hundested and Halsnæs in Denmark. Small- and medium-sized cities are the most common in the Nordic countries. Hence, there is a need to understand how diversity is approached in such cities. Small- and medium-sized cities also serve as interesting laboratories for studying these themes due to their complex yet small scale. The collection starts with analysing a map of how urban spaces are used as meeting places by different groups of urban dwellers. It then focuses on how art- and culture-based interventions and activities in voluntary organizations hold potential for living with, crossing and negotiating differences. We then turn to a discussion of how local diversity policies are designed and implemented before concluding with an insightful look at how inhabitants engage with everyday hospitality when faced with emergency and how this engagement challenges the Nordic welfare states’ current approaches toward refugees. This provides different perspectives on the relation between urban planning and development and diverse populations in the city. It also provides a line of thinking moving from urban (geographical) spaces, via encounters in such places, to local diversity policies and finally an approach that draw the lines from encounters to national state policies.