Challenges of urban diversity: inclusive cities vs. divided cities

From 10 to 14 March, Johannesburg will be the venue for the third and final part of the research and debate project “Challenges of urban diversity: inclusive cities vs. divided cities”, promoted by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (WWICS) in Washington, the CCCB and the Development Bank of Southern Africa in Johannesburg.

The project takes as its point of departure the conviction that cities, at least in the modern, democratic sense, only fully exist as such if they provide the scenarios and mechanisms for integration and the synergy of diversity, giving structure to cohesion on the basis of difference. How can this structure be created, maintained or renewed in a period of increasingly intensive escalation of urban diversity? How should we conceive and implement strategies of civic inclusion in order to construct effective mechanisms of shared citizenship over and above individual differences? These are the basic issues that inform the project, to which each institution contributes foremost experts from its respective geographical area.

Participant/s: Mejgan Massoumi, Ellen Brennan Galvin, Caroline Kihato, Loren Landau, Edesio Fernandes, Blair Ruble, Viktor Stepanenko, Alícia Fuentes, Steven Friedman, John Hannigan, Edgar Pieterse, Ash Amin, Michael Crang, Nezar Alsayyad, Ananya Roy, Pumla Gqola, Richard Stren, Joseph Tulchin, Josep Ramoneda, Joan Roca, Josep Subirós