ABSTRACT
The idea of ‘diversity’ in the city refers to the varied characteristics of the urban population, often with reference to their distribution in places. Though the presence and priorities of the range of social groups in the city has been a subject of interest in urban studies for the last century, the contemporary focus on urban diversity derives from feminist critiques of those class-based conceptualizations of urbanization and urban life that failed to acknowledge gender differences. The feminist philosopher, Nancy Fraser, laid out the territory of these debates in her efforts to combine “a cultural politics of difference” with a “social politics of equality” (1995: 69) and to see individuals as of equal social status without the need to reify the groups with which they affiliate (2004: 127). Diversity is now a term that accompanies ideas of multiculturalism, identity, and difference to form a conceptual apparatus reaching beyond the idea of an undifferentiated ‘urban public.’ Such concepts help reveal the embodied nature of injustice in the city, particularly its racialized and sexualized forms. Diversity takes particular forms in certain urban places; discourses of place can even help form identity (Nash 2007).
