Whose diversity? Race, space and the European city

Abstract

European cities have increasingly highlighted diversity as a marker of their progressive status. A growing field of research argues that “super-diverse” neighborhoods exemplify a normalization of ethnic and racial difference as a positive facet of everyday life. However, contemporary manifestations of urban diversity cannot be disentangled easily from the European colonial legacy that underlies a series of racial and spatial imaginaries. I argue that an inadequate conceptualization of race and ethnicity limits our appreciation of ongoing struggles over the meaning of urban diversity. The claimed reconfiguration of European cities as sites of normative diversity obscures the ongoing epistemological framing of Europe as white, thereby placing longstanding ethnic and racial minorities within a hierarchy of belonging. Contemporary narratives that focus on the normalization of difference in diverse neighborhoods fail to sufficiently engage with the dynamics of structural racism that underpin ethnic and racial categorizations.