Spatial Policies and Everyday Multiculturalism. A Proposal to Work with Difference “In the Field”

Abstract

In the last decade, many scholars have been very critical of the more established ways in which planning and urban policy deal with “diversity issues”, such as social mixing initiatives, or the creation of places of consumption such as the cultural and ethnic quarters. These policies are here assumed as forms of social control and care of people and places through space control. The paper takes stock of the current critical views and accepts their invitation to “suspend” a general regulative and design tension, by proposing a more reflexive position aimed at understanding how to capture the potentialities of places where forms of everyday multiculturalism and coexistence among strangers occur. To this end, based on more than twenty years of field-work and research, as well as on exchanges with colleagues dealing with these issues, a sort of “draft checklist” of some core points to be considered to develop ethnographical paths focused on the uses of the space in multicultural areas is proposed. This includes a methodological positioning on ethnographical approaches carried out by multicultural research teams where an added value is given to different viewpoints; a capacity to consider the intertwining between the very local dynamics of the micro-publics of encounter, but also the structural conditions underpinning the possibility for the encounter to occur; a broad view of multiculturalism related to an intersectional perspective where also inequalities are a core point; a very open definition of resources for planning and policymaking, able to go beyond the economic and growth-dependent dimension.