Cities of difference: Cultural juxtapositions and urban politics of representation

Abstract

This paper explores urban politics of representation and their role in processes of political and cultural participation for migrant and diasporic urban dwellers. Urban politics of representation are about finding a location in the city and about locating the city (or one's own city) in the world. Living, representing and being represented in the city is attached to looking for and finding (or failing to find) a place in the world. The strangers, the mobile subjects and the migrants seek (and sometimes find) a place of work and of sociality in the city. Often marginalized, patronized and excluded from formal (national) politics, they engage with the urban politics of representation either as actively seeking political representation or, and more often, as a reflection of their mobile status and their everyday engagement with images and representations of the self, community, the city and global culture. Unlike formal and national politics, urban politics of representation involve activities in the street, participation in local life, engagement with creative practices and the arts, among other things all of which increasingly involve appropriations of media and communication technologies. With reference to empirical material from London and New York, this paper argues that in the study of juxtapositions of difference in the city, we can observe politics of representation and forms of active (and mediated) citizenship, which are often ignored in formal politics for the management of diversity.

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