A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
This paper interrogates processes of everyday urban diversification by challenging dominant narratives of “diversity” and “integration”. I address the management aspects of urban diversification through the normative and productive categorisations of race, citizenship and civility in shared spaces to highlight the forms of differential inclusion of newcomers, drawing upon ethnographic data from Jurong West in Singapore, to explain subjective inclusion through state-led measures and everyday forms of coexistence. There are two key aspects of differential inclusion discussed here: a) the explicit rules that form the basis of differential state treatment of its population by race, ethnicity and citizenship status and b) the implicit principles in which migrants are included according to normative forms of appropriate behaviour in public spaces. Consequently, social norms and civility become tools of inclusion, and, relationally, exclusion, producing a politicised logic of managing diversity both in structural and everyday spaces. Recognising the profound ways in which differential inclusion shapes space through its subtle yet pervasive ways not only imparts analytical purchase to the study of everyday interactions but also grafts the meaning of belonging and difference onto the ever-changing contours of diversification in the city.
Though not an exhaustive list, these are many of the main areas we cover.
