Diversity discourses in urban policy: Lessons from Rotterdam and Toronto

The 21st century has witnessed a growing diversity of people and their uses of space within the city due to trends such as increasing interdependency of cities in a network society, global migration, transnationalism, population mobility, new and complex social formations, fluid identities, diversification of action spaces, et cetera. Many of the current policy discourses however fail to recognizse this increasingly multi-dimensional and dynamic nature of the emerging diversities in urban areas. Furthermore, cities often tend to focus on the negative consequences of diversity rather than treating diversity as an asset, while there is growing evidence for the fact that urban diversity can contribute to strong positive developments in cities such as increased social cohesion, enhanced economic performance, and social mobility for individuals and groups. The aim of this paper is to reveal the dominant discourses with regards to diversity in urban policy making in Rotterdam and Toronto in order to answer the following primary research question: how ‘just’ is urban policy addressing diversity? Lessons are drawn from Toronto and Rotterdam through the use of critical discourse analysis and qualitative interviews with key policy actors and stakeholders at the city scale. The paper concludes by stating that policy for just urban diversity needs to take full account of the complexity of the notion. Subsequently the deliberation and implementation of services and arrangements should reflect the particularities of their context and the specific needs of their targeted communities. The need for flexible and context-sensitive models in planning for a just diversity as opposed to prescriptive approaches such as assimilation is thereby highly pertinent.