Producing interculturality: repertoires, strategies and spaces

Abstract

Issues of cultural diversity governance have been on the agenda with regard to urban paradigms that seek to accommodate diversity driven by a globalized world. These new urbanscapes feature particular conditions of interaction involving cross-cultural social competences and have lately been analised according to an “ethics of encounter”. This text proposes three analytical axes to evaluate repertoires of cultural diversity in contemporary cities, particularly with regard to its inscription in public spaces and the underlying logic of their social organisation. Drawing on Foucault’s idea of the production of social realities, practices and subjectivities by means of the ways in which power circulates in social relations, I term this the production of interculturality. I argue that one can examine three logics of the production of interculturality at the urban space level: a political, an economic-competitive and an ethical-symbolic.