The Intercultural City: A Reader

Throughout history great cities have attracted people in all their variety, searching for a better life. This diversity in turn has provided a source new thinking, energy, inventiveness and wealth, which have driven the cities to even greater heights. Or so the theory goes. Is it really true and, if so, why does it happen, and how? More to the point, in a world where all cities are becoming more diverse than they ever were before, what are the real costs and benefits of difference and complexity? How can the processes involved be better understood and planned for? How can cities balance the innovative potential of diversity with the needs to create cohesion and common purpose? How can we move beyond the idea of urban diversity as exotica and into a pragmatic appraisal of how interculturalism as a resource and an asset? Gathering together 25 texts from an eclectic collection of sources, this Reader brings an unprecedented multiplicity of perspectives on this important issue. Works by major urbanists such as Jane Jacobs, Peter Hall, Richard Florida and Saskia Sassen sit alongside texts from the fields of economics and innovation, anthropology and cultural studies, management and communication as well as polemics from all sides of the debate on national identity, immigration and hybridity.