Re-orienting geographies of urban diversity and coexistence: Analyzing inclusion and difference in public space

I Introduction

…cities are precisely arenas of chance encounters. (And yet that thought itself should also bring to mind the countless exclusions which together accumulate to produce that space of the city). (Massey, 2005: 179)

I first review the geography of togetherness through the sharing of space. In the following section, I discuss predominant themes of sociality, encounters and strangerhood in everyday spaces which constitute a type of ‘commonplace diversity’ (Wessendorf, 2010). This first strand of work explores how strangers can engage each other in acts of kindness and compassion in their everyday interactions or through more quotidian and civil engagements as neighbours, vendors, and customers. These encounters express conviviality and constitute coexistence in public. Indeed, migration and the growing diversity of urban populations have brought about new experiences of space and contact, of cosmopolitanism, creolization and conviviality, and more crucially, new patterns of inequality, segregation and prejudice.

As Sara Ahmed points out, through her critique of post-colonial theory, however, a weakness of this work is ‘its failure to account for the structural conditions in which “local encounters” with hybridity and difference take place’ (2000: 12). Appadurai (2006), in his provocative essay on the geography of anger in Fear of Small Numbers, also powerfully reminded us of the consequence of benign neglect, widespread inequality, and prejudicial policies: extreme forms of political violence in liberal and cosmopolitan cities. In recent years, the growing intolerance and ignorance of cultural and religious difference, alongside an increase in racism and xenophobia, has created tense climates of desolation and antagonism, particularly brimming over in the United States, across many European countries, and in parts of Canada (Basu, 2011). Indeed, a narrative of urban diversity and coexistence that emphasizes play, hybridity and inbetweenness obscures the injuries of class, race and ethnicity and filters out the structural richness of space. Furthermore, the knowing of strangers, of difference, of newcomers, is ‘a means by which the “we” of the community is established, enforced and legitimated’ (Ahmed, 2000: 37). Yet, what constitutes this knowing, these modes of familiarization? What are the conditions under which they take place? Indeed, how do migration pathways of new arrivals shape demographic dynamics of a place? How do strategies of state actors and institutions sort, regulate, constitute and set the terms of diversity? Furthermore, how do these organizing strategies contour the politics of everyday coexistence in shared spaces? How do people differentiate in contexts of diversification? How do people systematize the kaleidoscope of difference? In asking these questions, I aim to conceptualize diversity as composed of a wider yet highly nuanced set of practices that re-engages broader structures with its linkages to everyday encounters. I argue that the politics of living with difference are not simply evident in the discourses, policies and technologies of exclusion and marginalization but, rather, lie in the management of difference through forms of differential inclusion as we see in different Asian contexts. There is a spatial grammar of urban diversity and co-existence which manifests in the management of difference through differential inclusion within geographical areas, whether it be how people are administered into receiving cities through various visa programmes or how they are positioned as different in everyday shared spaces through tacit rules of interaction. This paper pays particular attention to the latter point.

Rather than understanding the sharing of space as necessarily indicative of urban conviviality and shared bonds, a second strand of work explores the boundaries, selections and enclosures embedded within public spaces. Coexistence in a diverse context in this sense is marked relationally by broader structural inequalities, spatial subversion and selective incorporation (Elwood et al., 2016). Space is hence productive of differences, rather than merely a reflection of them. This is a critical point to an appreciation of the spatial power and potential of such experiences (Clayton, 2009). This work presents a geography of structured and structuring practices which govern and manage these micro-publics. Consequently, it is productive to highlight the nuanced work of difference-making, of multiplication (Mezzadra and Nielson, 2013), that is done at both policy and everyday levels, which selectively includes: that is, which filters, sorts, manages and organizes diversity.

Much of the recent work on urban diversity also remains centred on Western European contexts such as the United Kingdom (Amin, 2012; Neal et al., 2015; Valentine, 2008; Valentine et al., 2012; Wilson, 2011) and ‘immigrant’ countries such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Hiebert, 2002; Pearson, 2001). Yet, as Jennifer Robinson, Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong remind us, there is not only potential but indeed, urgency, in ‘worlding’ urban theory such that the non-West contributes conceptually rather than just empirically (Roy and Ong, 2011; Roy, 2009; Robinson, 2002, 2003; McGuirk, 2015). By widening our range of sites for empirical and theoretical enquiry, we multiply our range of analytical tools and conceptual contours along the lines discussed in the following. In so doing, we uncover novel and important socio-spatial formations as they are playing out, rather than prescribing ‘ought-ness’ to living with diversity (i.e. how coexistence in the context of diversification ought to be). The literature on migration systems in Asia is strongly established yet the scholarship on living with diversity in Asia has not received as much attention as in European contexts. Beyond discussing the historical realities of diversity in Asia, there has been relatively little said about the processes, meanings and significances of co-existing with migrant-led diversity (Collins et al., 2013). Having said this, this paper is not seeking to identify a city or cities that might be deemed paradigmatic for an increasingly de-western-centred world. My wider concern is with ways in which diverse cities, including but not limited to Asian cities such as Singapore, not only exceed existing conceptualizations of urban diversity but can highlight the structural dimensions of diversity management and incorporation by state agencies, or what emerges in the absence of state management. Furthermore, these forms of management surpass explicit policies and programmes by being adopted and perpetuated by people in everyday shared spaces.

In this light, the following two sections discuss the two key strands of work identified about the state of the art on co-presence and micro-encounters within the diversifying city and on the structuring of these encounters. Despite discussing each stream of the literature separately for clarity, I understand them as inseparable. By drawing upon these two branches of existing debates, my argument in the penultimate section extends beyond thinking about how inclusion is managed and discusses more broadly how difference and urban diversity itself is constituted and managed. With reference to Asian case studies, I demonstrate that diversity management intersects with labour migration management. Beyond selected incorporation into labour markets, migrants continue to be subjected to incorporation practices. In practice, not only are integration measures embedded with assimilation practices but are also often, at their core, about disciplining and educating new arrivals to continue establishing the norms of the majority. Underlying this review of the state of the art of urban diversity research is the discussion of its conceptual implications for public space. Through this analytical framework, this paper then outlines the agenda for future debate and research. In critically examining ‘inclusion’, I call for its re-politicization. There needs to be more attention to the impact of structural inequalities on perceived ‘positive outcomes’ of urban diversity, and of the contingent effects of the characteristics and histories of migrant populations and the local politics of place.

II Co-presence and togetherness in the city: The potential of space

The celebration of co-presence within city life has a long history in urban studies, beginning with analyses of contact with subjects different from ourselves; from Simmel (1950), who hailed everyday encounters with difference as crucial for development of novel personalities, through Jacob’s (1961) ‘eyes upon the street’ theory of collectively co-created safety of everyday urban streetscapes, to Young’s emphasis on contact with strangers to reduce prejudice and Sennett’s (2012) idea of urban cooperation.

As new diversities arising from migration continue both to enrich and complicate the dynamics of urban community, there has been a renewed interest in the potential of intercultural encounter for greater inclusivity. Indeed, the keen awareness of growing social diversity arising from migration in the contemporary global city has prompted a range of interest in coexistence, urban citizenship and contact across difference and within a context of (super)diversification (Seidman, 2012; Vertovec and Cohen, 2002; Phillips, 2015; Vertovec, 2007). Geographical scholarship on the social and cultural texture of globalizing cities has revealed a proliferating range of ‘contact zones’ shaped by local-transnational encounters, which hinge on a number of registers including nationality, race, religion, language, class, legal status, gender and sexuality (Binnie et al., 2006; Jarvis et al., 2009; Lai et al., 2013; Vertovec, 2015). In describing the diversification processes in the global city, Sandercock (2003) used the metaphor of the ‘mongrel city’ to characterize ‘an emerging condition in which difference, otherness, multiplicity, heterogeneity, diversity and plurality prevail’, while Amin and Graham (1997) coined the term ‘the multiplex city’ to describe the contemporary urban as ‘the co-presence of multiple spaces, times and networks of relations, tying local sites, subjects and fragments into globalizing networks of economic, social and cultural change’. In cities that are thoroughly hybrid and which are crucibles of diverse stranger gatherings, it becomes all the more important for the politics of the impersonal where there is a respect for distance amongst strangers (Amin, 2012).

Terms such as ‘multiculturalism’, ‘integration’, ‘social cohesion’ and, indeed, ‘diversity’ have become prominent in both political and academic discourse in describing social relations and often, prescribing how they ought to be in contexts peopled by individuals of different backgrounds. This is noted in contrast to the logics of ‘assimilation’ where the expectation is of immigrants to ‘melt’ into the host society. Ehrkamp (2006: 1675) critiques the utopian concept of assimilation and demonstrates, through her case study of the experiences of Turks in Germany, the ‘unequal power relations that arise between majority and minority groups’ that are often neglected through discourses of assimilation.

A growing stream of research celebrates convivial coexistence through fleeting encounters. In this context ‘fleeting’ refers to the casual, the spontaneous, the not formalized (Brown, 2008; Halvorsen, 2015; Horgan, 2017; Wilson, 2016). These short-lived encounters in public spaces are important, given that the majority of our encounters with diversity occur within these situations (Lofland, 1998). By engaging the sharing of space through the ephemeral, space – in this body of work – is imagined as open and ever in genesis. In re-imagined cities, Thrift argues that strangers engage each other in ‘acts of kindness and compassion’ in their everyday interactions (2005: 140). Their quotidian and civil engagements as neighbours or as vendors and customers express and constitute ‘being-togetherness’ (Amin, 2006: 1012). Furthermore, the intense gathering of ethnic and cultural difference is seen as spurring transformation of cities into ‘cosmopolitan melting pots where hybrid identities connect the most intimate relations with the most remote places’ (Simonsen, 2008: 146). Koch and Latham’s (2011) ethnographic observations of the Prince of Wales Junction in West London further shows the forms of sociality and togetherness through actions that ‘domesticate’ public spaces.

Crawford’s (1999) garage sales on the front lawns in Los Angeles are another example of such shared places, mixing people up and representing a space of co-mingling. In her book City Publics: The (Dis)enchantments of Urban Encounters (2006), Watson proposes the notion of ‘rubbing along’ as a form of transient encounters between social subjects where recognition of different others through a glance or gaze, seeing and being seen, sharing embodied spaces, in talk or silence, has the potential to militate against the withdrawal into the self or private realm. In writing about the transformative potential of the market, Watson goes on to argue that a minimal level of encounter that comes through inhabiting the same space as those who are different from oneself, such as markets, can have the

potential to play a part in challenging racist discourses and stereotypes of unknown others. This is not the Habermasian notion of public space as a site for rational debate and communication; rather, it is the space of pedestrian rhetoric…of weaving complexity and difference into the texture of mundane everyday life. (2009: 1582)

Similarly, Wise and Velayutham (2014) also demonstrate that the enactment of caring for others in everyday spaces contributes to the buzz of the place. Very little antagonism or hostility to different others was expressed in these shared spaces, reinforcing their importance in challenging the fear of unknown others. In their study of urban green spaces, Neal et al. (2015: 475) show how public parks are not only sites for the ‘being together’ of multicultural strangers but formative in the ‘bringing together’ of these diverse populations. This forms the active basis of ‘high affectivity’ and ‘inclusive sociality’, in particular towards marginalized groups, such as traders and shoppers with disabilities and newcomers from other parts of Europe and Australia (Hiebert et al., 2015; Neal et al., 2013; Watson, 2009; Wise and Velayutham, 2014).

This first strand of work provides crucial insight into the transformative potentials of micro-encounters within diversifying settings. As Nayak points out, this attention on conviviality affirms the significance of ‘light-brush’ encounters in the making and remaking of a progressive sense of place where difference constitutes the new norm (2017: 291). Yet, as important as these debates have been, they have offered less in terms of critical engagement with organization. Within these seemingly inclusive spaces, what forms do processes of difference-making and boundary-drawing take? How do power inequalities and exclusion unfold within these short-lived, yet potentially repeated, encounters? How must people behave in order for a diverse society to work? Scholars have also pointed out that there are place-based modes of creating difference and boundaries within these spaces of encounter that need not intrinsically be universally inclusive. It is this second strand of work within the urban diversity literature to which I now turn.

III Incorporating difference and diversity in everyday shared spaces: The ambivalence of space

Such affirmative assessments of physical proximities of people of diverse cultural, social, or ethnic backgrounds that seem to embody city life have long been, of course, accompanied by equally strong critical accounts of contact, cities and city life. In his book The Nature of Prejudice, Allport (1954) cautions against romanticizing contact as sufficient to improve inter-group relations.

To date, there is a smaller but, more importantly, growing body of urban encounters research that addresses the structural context in which these encounters occur. This is the second significant strand of contemporary literature on encounters and urban diversity, which underlines that monitoring measures are limited in bridging differences and providing feelings of safety and comfort in shared spaces (Amin, 2012; Fincher and Iveson, 2008). Space, in this understanding of diversity, is much more ambivalent. This strand of work that takes structure into consideration highlights that pre-existing social and spatial inequality can heighten intolerance, setting the stage for discriminatory treatment in everyday spaces (Matejskova and Leitner, 2011). In workplaces where people from diverse ethno-racial groups are called upon to cooperate, their interactions are influenced by hierarchical social relations among co-workers that characterize most workplaces. This could reduce the positive impacts of contact. As Ray and Preston (2014) argue, however, the adverse effects of these hierarchical relations may be confounded at least partially by repeated, albeit superficial, contacts with diverse strangers that characterize many work locations. This interplay between social differentiation and physical encounters is, as Ahmed and Stacey explain, a way ‘of thinking through the nearness of other others, but a nearness that involves distanciation and difference’ (2001:7). Lawson and Elwood demonstrate this through their analysis of classed encounters in the Pacific Northwest and Chicago. Examining encounters in the welfare office and community meetings, they illustrate how these interactions foster governance and/or contact processes that reproduce or disrupt dominant discourses about poverty (Lawson and Elwood, 2014).

Physical proximity of diverse populations in spaces such as buses, parks and public squares also has the potential to generate hostility as much as conviviality. Nayak’s (2017) work on British Bangladeshi young women demonstrates that routine interactions are negotiated through topographies of power and inequality. In exposing the racist violence that unfolds in mundane British mobilities and spaces, Nayak (2017) reminds us of the tension and rupture that point to the inequalities that are compounded through encounters. Exploring diversity in Australian cities, Fincher and Iveson (2008: 211) note that planning for encounters is more likely to be successful if it involves a ‘light touch’ rather than the micromanagement of individuals. In examining the hierarchical nature of settle–indigenous sociality in Australia, Povinelli argues that liberal forms of cultural recognition have the unintended effect of either bracketing difference or establishing a ‘red line of toleration’ (2011: 93). The outcome is that tolerance is always practised along modalities of recognition that spy on indigenous peoples who try to penetrate sealed social spaces and uncloak those who hide via embodied disguise (Povinelli, 2011).

Exploring the politics of belonging in a small town in Minnesota that is being transformed through immigration, Leitner reminds us that long-time residents often try to ‘defend their place and associated identities that they feel are under threat from global and mobile forces, conceiving of place as a site with a clearly circumscribed culture and identity, rather than as a site that is open and constantly emerging’ (2012: 831). Simone also highlights that while everyday interactions in two of Jakarta’s inner city kampungs may appear to indicate social collaboration, these can hide extremely ambivalent maneuvers of opportunism and Trickery (2014). In a related stream of argument, Valentine has argued strongly that everyday encounters are often only indicators of socially accepted forms of public civility, and ‘urban etiquette does not equate with an ethics of care and mutual respect for difference’ (2008: 329). This line of argument also highlights that transient encounters, even of a positive nature, do not necessarily ‘scale up’, that is, develop any lasting challenge to embedded prejudices and stereotypes (see also Clayton, 2009). Regardless, Valentine’s more recent work has continued to show how mundane and routine forms of sharing space are embedded with acts and justifications of prejudice against people of different backgrounds (Valentine et al., 2015).

While encounters may frequently reflect and reinforce the positionalities of those involved, they nonetheless can hold possibilities of change because they are mediated socially. The complexities of living with diversity are therefore conveyed through a productive ambivalence within this strand of the literature. Indeed, the uncertainty about what can be delivered by the focus on encounter has been examined by Askins and Pain (2011) in their work with a mixed group of youth in a community arts project in the northeast of England. Wilson (2011) has also explored the social relations of mixed populations using public transport in the English city of Birmingham. What the research of Askins and Pain (2011) and Wilson (2011) both particularly highlight is, first, the unstable nature of an encounter and, second, the importance of the materiality of place in shaping its tone. For instance, Askins and Pain argue that the tactility of actual art materials invited interactions and mixing, ‘contact with and through objects…mediated points of connection and similarity, opening up potential for new social relations to be enacted’ (2011: 817). Wilson also suggests that the intimacies of travelling by public transport by heterogeneous populations – bodies closely sharing confined spaces – demands sets of practices and obligations that can produce sometimes conflictual, but also sometimes consensual, social relations and even a sense of being part of a ‘collective culture’ and ‘temporary community’ (2011: 646). Neal et al. (2015) focus on the importance of public parks as a site for multicultural interaction where green spaces are valued and celebrated as convivial and inclusive even if they are also associated with conflict. This approach to diversity offers a distinct way of addressing contemporary public spaces and the dynamics of difference that shape them.

Public spaces remain sites where long-time residents of multicultural make-up must co-exist and interact with newcomers in highly prosaic and constantly evolving ways. Indeed, fleeting encounters in shared spaces are still the most common in terms of associations in public (Lofland, 1998). Occurring between or among individuals who are personally unknown to one another, these associations, as the name implies, are short-lived and do not necessarily involve spoken exchanges, and even if there were words exchanged, these could be limited to ‘restrained helpfulness’ (Lofland, 1998: 53). Fleeting encounters challenge the fear of the ‘other’ embedded in relations with strangers; they disrupt stereotypical categories, and open up space for reflection and change afforded by its temporary nature. On the one hand, then, transient encounters allow for a low-stakes sort of inclusion where interactions with strangers are short-lived. I have demonstrated that in Singapore’s diversifying Jurong West, the figure of the familiar stranger allows for a breathable sort of diversity in shared space (Ye, 2015). By breathability, I mean that this is a form of diversity where people can live without rancour because there is no pressure to invest in prolonged interactions across difference in shared spaces. On the other hand, I would also argue that situating the understanding of everyday diversity and coexistence through fleeting encounters tells us about norms: that is, the micro-tones of place-based, locally-contingent modes of civility and codes of conduct.

I do not assert, however, that the ethos of public spaces is always or even should be speaking to a sense of shared identity or collective bond, as many scholars mentioned above have argued. There is nothing predetermined about public space (Ruddick, 1996). Indeed, as Doreen Massey (2005) reminds us, public space is itself produced through its daily negotiations and struggles. Genuine public space is neither romantic nor empty but is, instead, embedded with heterogeneity and made through relational and conflicting social identities and social relations (Massey, 2005). In spaces of rapid change, the sharing of space with different others could be an instrumental, rather than an intrinsic, desire for a cosmopolitan conviviality. As Landau and Freemantle’s (2016) work in informal settlements in peri-urban Kenya and South Africa reminds us, however, a functional form of togetherness can require little sense of shared identity or enduring bonds. Urban conviviality in Rongai and Katlehong is rooted in a usufruct, utilitarian extraction: that is, people interact on a daily basis through a ‘largely instrumental ethics: oriented towards accessing and extracting the “fruits” of urban space while simultaneously…enacting life elsewhere’ (2016: 933). Much of this is a response to the informal ways in which people arrive in these two peri-urban neighbourhoods, and also in response to the absence of coherent state interventions. Indeed, while much of the work on daily encounters has been helpful in addressing the significance of everyday forms of rubbing along, it remains unclear what the mechanisms, principles or ethos are that enable people to negotiate the boundaries of diversity through everyday encounters. Laudau and Freemantle’s work is particularly helpful in addressing a gap in the literature on encounters on the modes of organization in a context of rapid diversification. Many African migrants actively resist the bonds of belonging as their intentions are for rural retirements or to move elsewhere. This directly challenges the sizable European literature which often asserts that people want to invest in the meaning of community, belonging and criteria for membership in the context of immigration and diversity (Yuval-Davis et al., 2005; Kalra and Kapoor, 2009). Ash Amin has written about this particular politics of place as one of local accommodation. This is not a vocabulary of place that is reducible to a politics of community, but rather emphasizes a politics without guarantees. Accommodation is always provisional (Amin, 2002).

Pre-existing inequalities can also be subverted in spatial ways, even in places where state agencies hold strong legitimacy. Yeoh and Huang (1998) draw attention to the way low-waged Filipina domestic workers use public spaces, such as Orchard Road’s Lucky Plaza, during their rest days. The temporary but regular appropriation of these spaces by female domestic workers as well as the ways in which they are accommodated reflect, reinforce and sometimes circumvent larger unequal power relations at these public spaces, at least temporarily. Similarly, low-waged, low-status Bangladeshi male migrants also assert their presence within different public spaces in the Singaporean landscape in complex and contentious ways (see, for example, Ye, 2013). By appropriating spaces that are overlooked by other urban residents as socializing spaces, these migrants are circumventing official policy, marking their presence in the city (Collins, 2012). In other words, while their use of such spaces is largely a result of exclusion from typically middle-class places such as within shopping malls, their act of appropriation reconfigures the dynamics of specific urban spaces. Undoubtedly, there remains great precarity in the lives of low-waged migrants where strong and sometimes abusive relations of power occur in everyday life and reflect inter-group attitudes and practices. Thus, while these instances of appropriation do not directly or permanently challenge broader inequalities, such practices of claiming space are important precisely because they allude to the different spatialized forms of coexisting with difference in the city. Where these practices of space-claiming happen, however, is scarcely the sort of harmonious getting along that Anderson (2011) describes in The Cosmopolitan Canopy. There are constant tensions, struggles and disquiet over how things ought to be in such spaces, revealing political dynamics – norms, acceptable and legitimate codes of conduct – that shape the nature of specific diverse, shared spaces. These spatial contestations of urban diversity are important. The spatiality of diverse public places is not only formed through a ‘myriad of quotidian negotiation and contestation’ but, further, ‘through the practicing of place, negotiation is forced upon us’ (Massey, 2005: 154).

This second key strand of work on urban diversity, therefore, highlights the modalities of power that shape the way diversity is organized in particular places, spatializing the politics of diversification. As Massey states, ‘all spaces are socially regulated in some way, if not by explicit rules, then by more competitive (market-like?) regulation that exists in the absence of explicit…controls’ (2005: 152). Bramwell’s (2015) research on the life-worlds of hip-hop in London directly engages with the city as a lively anthology of spaces, revealing how formative interstitial spaces such as the bus and the mobile phone are in being public. These interstitial spaces, however, are as potentially productive as they are discriminatory. Gilroy (2012) exposes the banal setting for extreme racial abuse on the commuter train, while Listerborn (2012) demonstrates the quotidian gendered and Islamophobic violence that Muslim women experience when they wear the hijab in public spaces in Sweden. Suzie Hall (2017: 1570) suggests a more mobile conception of being public, where ‘the city is learnt as a transverse of experiences composed of bits and pieces as we move from one realm to another, where the regulation of the human body is never detached from the process of learning’ (emphasis added). These in-betweens, these spaces of thin interactions and aggressive everyday interruptions, potentially incorporate the underbelly of analysing diversity and the city, paying attention to crucial combinations of being public that tie us to the city and at the same time alienate us from it.

Implicit, tacit and learnt rules also form the spatial grammar of public spaces. That is, as Amin (2012), Sennett (1970) and Staeheli (2010) have demonstrated, there is an order that regulates public space and, further, these orders regulate users of public space. In this sense, the management of difference and diversity is a spatial process that takes places in these spaces of coexistence. As several scholars have pointed out, migrant-led Asian urbanizations are rarely oriented towards naturalization and migrants are incorporated with various limits on the occupations they can access, where they can live, as well as citizenship rights and privileges (Ho, 2016; Yeoh, 2006; Ye, 2013; Chin and Smith, 2014; Zhou and Liu, 2016). These structural grammars of differentiating new arrivals amongst themselves and within a larger urban populace manifest in shared spaces as well (Collins, 2016). In my own engagements with everyday diversity management in Singapore, I find that norms of civility are also a subtle yet prevalent form of power through the mundane in which urban diversity is encountered and governed in the everyday (Ye, 2016). It is through norms where people are evaluated as to whether they belong or not. It is, therefore, through norms that the power of management is reinforced. The violation of civility, norms and values by people, which in rapidly diversifying cities like Singapore also include new arrivals, exposes the spatial grammar of coexisting with diversity: that is, the dominant orderings in spaces of encounters with difference. These orderings highlight who knows how to behave and who does not. In this sense, (non)belonging is constituted through these orderings. This approach allows us to ‘scale up’ fleeting encounters in public zones of contact by situating them within a broader structural context led by state policies and initiatives. What this approach reveals is therefore the political subjectivities of people within these diversifying spaces (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). The next section of the paper highlights the importance of critically engaging ‘inclusion’ as the next line of inquiry in urban diversity.

IV Managing diversity through differential inclusion: Reinforcing oughtness in space

The concept of differential inclusion has travelled widely to theorize various strategic organization and permutations of citizenship. Although it has assumed many names, this concept has long provided a means for describing and analysing how inclusion in a sphere or realm can be subject to varying degrees of subordination, rule, discrimination and segmentation (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). Its strength lies in demonstrating how its deployment through both state and everyday practices situates and flexibilizes the experience of belonging through the calculated processes of inclusion. I extend the concept of differential inclusion into the realm of urban diversity. This highlights the fragility, relationality and contingency of diversity practices and discourses. Furthermore, evidence from Asian cities points to the imperative of the intertwined relationship of diversity with the governance of labour migration. Here the conceptual contours of inclusion within diversifying urban settings become more nuanced when we broaden our empirical repertoire of diversifying cities to include those in Asia. Coexistence with diversity is not only shaped by state-led migration and labour policies but within different aspects of everyday life. This is to say that fleeting modes of everyday ‘rubbing along’ in public spaces must be contextualized within broader human mobilities and structural forms that are shaped by state institutions and actors. Indeed, government policy measures, campaigns and discourses of diversity do not lie separate from everyday modes of governance and organization of difference. Rather, they selectively link and organize places and people through the everyday re-enactment of narratives of diversity that do not simply form the backdrop but, indeed, produce the very contours of how diversity ought to be. In this sense, measures, practices and discourses of inclusion, at its core, form the basis of diversity management that extend beyond citizenship divisions within labour markets (Yeoh, 2006) and the reproduction of national boundaries (Giglioli, 2017). Inclusion, in terms of ‘integration’, can be a normalizing process. Li noted that ‘integration’, as described in much policy discourse, is the process by which immigrants become ‘productive members and develop close relations with mainstream society’ (2003: 3). Yet, as Li persuasively argued, integration defined in such a narrow way is a theoretical problem as it involves ‘integrating difference in light of the universal or cohesive values of democracy’ (p. 2). Derrida (2001) located a contradictory imperative in his discussion on cosmopolitanism, which contributes to a powerful understanding of incorporation:

On the one hand, there is an unconditional hospitality which should offer the right of refuge to all immigrants and newcomers. But on the other hand, hospitality has to be conditional: there has to be some limitation on rights of residence. (cited in Basu, 2011: 1313)

V Conclusion

By reviewing the key strands of geographical imaginations in the growing fields of urban diversity and coexistence, this paper calls for a place-based examination of the concept of inclusion as one that is, at its core, about management and reinforcing norms in public spaces. At a moment when urban diversity and coexistence are rapidly gaining momentum in geographical research, it is crucial that geographers are clear and intentional in precisely how we write – indeed, ‘do’ – diversity, and to what ends. I have sought to make sense of the myriad ways that urban diversity has been discussed through a vast range of geographical scholarship. Much of the geography of togetherness with its predominant themes of sociality, encounters and strangerhood has highlighted the importance of micro-encounters in everyday life. In this body of work, distance and proximity between strangers with diverse backgrounds characterize the increasingly hybrid contact zones of cities. Coexistence in shared spaces is argued to generate not only tolerance but conviviality and a form of living with difference without rancour. Another growing strand of work, however, cautions against the romanticization, and often Euro-centric prescription, of coexistence, by addressing the structural context in which these encounters occur. State and city-led measures of governance, such as in Singapore, are fundamentally shaping forms of coexistence. Beyond that, however, urban inhabitants are also fundamentally shaping the forms of coexistence; urban inhabitants are themselves organizing and normalizing particular contours of differentiation, indeed, as demonstrated in the cases of sites like Katlehong and Rongai where socio-spatial organization is vibrant and efficient in the absence of formal state-led measures. As mentioned earlier, coexistence with diversity is not only managed through state-led migration and labour policies but in everyday life. Both new arrivals and long-time residents can choose to remain simply indifferent to difference or to include the former based on implicit rules of public engagement. Rather than sharing of space as indicative of urban conviviality and shared bonds, there are boundaries and enclosures embedded within these public spaces. Coexistence in a diverse context in this sense is marked relationally by broader structural inequalities, spatial subversion and selective incorporation.

Critical attention to inclusion takes debates about the meaning of coexistence in new directions by emphasizing the manifold ways in which the sharing of space come to matter. In this vein, I have outlined a future line of inquiry, which prompts us to think geographically about managing diversity by examining the orientations, intentions and implications of inclusion at the scales of policy and the everyday. Drawing upon Asian case studies, I argue that it is the differentiated processes of inclusion that generate, manage and politically ground the everyday enactments of difference in diverse settings. Future urban sociality and modes of living with difference in the Global North, such as Toronto, London and Birmingham, may scarcely resemble Singapore, Bangkok and Jakarta. It is, nevertheless, important that we expand our portfolio of sites for empirical and theoretical interrogations – that is, to intellectually engage with the wide-ranging geographies of urban diversity. Consequently, we must also further develop our range of analytical tools and normative standards along the lines discussed here. In so doing, we uncover the more nuanced and novel conceptualizations as well as the important socio-political patterns that are already in process.