A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
Urban Diversity: Disentangling the Cultural from the Economic Case
For many planners and city branders a pluralistic urban society, variation in architectural styles and mixed-uses render cities creative, competitive and more livable. Diversity, as the new orthodoxy in urban planning and policy, embodies the opposite of earlier, top-down modernist planning ideals. Reading diversity as a cipher for the market, as I set out to do in this article, lays bare the normative trajectories of these discourses of diversity. In so doing, I make two arguments. First, while it is often assumed that urban diversity makes cities more cosmopolitan and more economically productive, I contend that the cultural and economic logics of diversity are not mutually re-enforcing, but can often contradict one another. The same regime of market rule that supposedly leads to more diverse and livable postindustrial cities, produces increasing spatial inequalities. Second, I suggest that a perspective that highlights the structuring force of physical urban infrastructures sheds light on these pathdependent patterns of segregation, thereby allowing us to understand struggles over place and meaning in ways that move beyond the current limitations of diversity discourses.
Urban Diversity: Disentangling the Cultural from the Economic Case
For many planners and city branders a pluralistic urban society, variation in architectural styles and mixed-uses render cities creative, competitive and more livable. Diversity, as the new orthodoxy in urban planning and policy, embodies the opposite of earlier, top-down modernist planning ideals. Reading diversity as a cipher for the market, as I set out to do in this article, lays bare the normative trajectories of these discourses of diversity. In so doing, I make two arguments. First, while it is often assumed that urban diversity makes cities more cosmopolitan and more economically productive, I contend that the cultural and economic logics of diversity are not mutually re-enforcing, but can often contradict one another. The same regime of market rule that supposedly leads to more diverse and livable postindustrial cities, produces increasing spatial inequalities. Second, I suggest that a perspective that highlights the structuring force of physical urban infrastructures sheds light on these pathdependent patterns of segregation, thereby allowing us to understand struggles over place and meaning in ways that move beyond the current limitations of diversity discourses.
Urban Diversity: Disentangling the Cultural from the Economic Case
Vormann, Boris (author)
New Diversities ; 17 ; 119-129
2015
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
Cultural diversity, institutions, and urban economic performance
| Online Contents | 2012
Beyond Nomenclature: Urban Parks for Cultural Diversity
| British Library Online Contents | 2003
Rethinking urban parks : public space & cultural diversity
| TIBKAT | 2005
Equity and Cultural Diversity in Urban Design
| British Library Conference Proceedings | 1995