Intercultural Cities: Enriching Australian Multiculturalism?

Abstract

Since its inception in 2008, the Council of Europe’s Intercultural Cities program (ICC) has been gaining traction in increasingly diverse parts of the world. In 2017 and 2018 respectively, the City of Ballarat and the City of Melton became the first Australian cities to join the network. This ‘intercultural turn’ in local government signals a significant development in Australian diversity policy. To date, however, it has received limited scholarly attention. To help address this gap, this paper draws on interviews and focus groups with the architects of the intercultural turn to investigate the policy motivations that propelled it and the policy shifts that it brought about. The paper also engages with policy and theoretical debates about the nature and scope of interculturalism as an approach to diversity policy that may transcend some of the limitations of multiculturalism. Ultimately, the paper argues that interculturalism offers a valuable contribution to Australia’s multicultural policy framework, but that combining the two perspectives may be more complicated than prevailing views suggest.