Dealing with Urban Diversity: Promises and Challenges of City Life for Intercultural Citizenship

• Published date: 01 October 2010
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591710372869
• Date: 01 October 2010
• Author: Bart van Leeuwen
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Theory
38(5) 631 –657
Dealing with Urban
© 2010 SAGE Publications
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Diversity: Promises
DOI: 10.1177/0090591710372869
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and Challenges
of City Life for
Intercultural Citizenship
Bart van Leeuwen1
Abstract
Intercultural citizenship seems to benefit from certain generic aspects of
city life that carry a negative quality, such as “blasé attitude” or the typical
“indifference” of city dwellers. The main part of this essay argues that this
observation allows the formulation of a moral minimum—a threshold
conception—of intercultural citizenship in the urban setting, namely,
what I call side-by-side citizenship. A certain level of indifference makes
possible personal freedom and a tolerant multicultural city, although
there are more ideal formulations of intercultural citizenship, such as in
terms of agonism or cosmopolitanism. However, these more ambitious
forms easily become too demanding given the muddle of everyday urban
living conditions, which tend to promote mutual reserve and impersonal
social relations. A modest and realistic conception of intercultural
citizenship could prove crucial in motivating citizens to act according to
some minimal standards.
Keywords
cultural diversity, city life, citizenship, interculturalism, indifference
1Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands
Corresponding Author:
Bart van Leeuwen, Radboud University Nijmegen, Political Science,
Thomas van Aquinostraat 5, P.O. Box 9108, 6500 HK Nijmegen, Netherlands
Email: b.vanleeuwen@fm.ru.nl

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Political Theory 38(5)
Urbanization is rapidly changing the way in which most citizens of contem-
porary states live. Urbanization refers to a growth in the proportion of the
population of a country living in urban centers of a particular size. The speed
of this social development has been extremely high since the nineteenth cen-
tury.1 This massive shift from a spread-out pattern of human settlement to
one of concentration in urban centers represents “a new and fundamental step
in man’s social evolution.”2 Many citizens now live in large and dense agglom-
erations that involve a degree of human contact and of social complexity
never before known. As one urban theorist puts it dramatically, these agglom-
erations “exceed in size the communities of any other large animal: they
suggest the behavior of communal insects rather than of mammals.”3
If it is true that urban conditions shape the making of the modern citizen,
as many urban theorists claim,4 should we not incorporate this development
into our normative models of citizenship? In other words, do contemporary
models of citizenship take sufficiently into account this “new and fundamen-
tal step in man’s social evolution”? Since a high level of concentrated social
and cultural diversity is one of the key characteristics of city life, I will focus
specifically on intercultural citizenship. What virtues (dispositions/attitudes,
competences/capacities) are essential to living with cultural and ethnic diver-
sity, and in what way do the structural elements of urbanism promote or
hinder the cultivation of these intercultural virtues?
The objective of this article is to develop an empirically grounded and
multilayered concept of intercultural citizenship. It should be empirically
grounded because existing conceptions of intercultural virtue have the ten-
dency to abstract from the muddle of everyday urban living conditions, which
tend to promote mutual reserve and impersonal social relations. As a result,
these conceptions are often preoccupied with very demanding forms of citi-
zenship, for instance in terms of openness,5 appreciation,6 or even liking and
being attracted to otherness.7
The conception of citizenship that I seek to develop is multilayered in order
to be able to make a crucial distinction between a minimal, or threshold, con-
ception of intercultural citizenship and increasingly demanding modes. Such
a graded conception of intercultural urban citizenship, however, should not
become mired in a sterile description of increasingly demanding virtues,
important as this may be; it should also describe its diverse institutional pre-
conditions while taking the urban context into account. Because I consider the
moral minimum the most important issue, I will devote the main part of the
essay to it. The phrase moral minimum is being used in a specific sense here.
It does not refer to an abstract or procedural “core” of morality in a general
philosophical sense but to a threshold value within a moral hierarchy of

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van Leeuwen
633
intercultural ethos against the background of the urban public sphere.8 The
practical significance is that a modest and realistic conception of intercultural
citizenship could prove crucial in motivating citizens to act according to some
minimal standards. However, I will start with more idealistic and ambitious
formulations of intercultural city-zenship9 and will argue that these formula-
tions, namely cosmopolitan citizenship and agonistic citizenship, are not
always feasible in “dealing with urban diversity.” Then I will move toward the
best practicable alternative, what I will call side-by-side citizenship.
Cosmopolitan Citizenship
Every city has its own characteristics that make the character of its city life
unique. There is, so to speak, no essence of the city, but only “family resem-
blances.” A minimal definition of the modern city describes it as a complex
society of which the geographic area is very small in proportion to the number
of inhabitants.10 This dense population is characterized by intense heteroge-
neity that stems from migrations to the city of very diverse social groups:
ethnic, cultural, artistic, professional, intranational, and international groups.
In the city we therefore find a high level of cultural complexity and subcul-
tural variety within a relatively limited space.11
Urban social complexity is the reason that some theorists, like Iris Young,
consider the city a place in which citizens receive positive incentives for
recognizing and accepting social difference. City life is characterized by a
sense that people are different and that the city is composed of social groups
that have their own basis of identification. As a consequence, differences
between social groups are likely to flourish. Moreover, urban living involves
the positive experience of difference in terms of excitement, adventure, or
eroticism. The idea here is that we like being drawn out of our secure routine
to encounter the novel, strange, and surprising.12
This could imply that city-zens have better sociocultural resources at their
disposal for developing intercultural skills such as a willingness to contact
the strange and unfamiliar. Sennett argues that dense, disorderly, overwhelm-
ing cities provide individuals with the experience that is necessary in order to
achieve “full adulthood.” They learn to cultivate freedom by accepting “pain-
ful surprises and disorder.”13 Other theorists have made similar observations
concerning the city as the proper breeding ground for citizenship,14 although
some argue that its positive potential has yet to be realized.15 This perspective
on city life represents the ideal of the city as a place of genuine acceptance
of, connection with, and respect for the cultural other. It is the ideal of cos-
mopolitanism embodied in a stance of openness toward divergent cultural

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Political Theory 38(5)
expressions, a stance characterized by a search for contrasts rather than uni-
formity and safe cultural predictability.
Cosmopolitanism in this cultural sense, that is, in terms of a love of cul-
tural difference and a readiness to draw on different cultural sources, is some-
times associated with “freewheeling.” Yet notwithstanding the connotation
of superficial flânerie, proper cultural cosmopolitanism requires particular
skills that are not self-evident, given that the negotiating and navigating of
difference require first of all a tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty and,
secondly, a capacity to interpret the strange aspects of another cultural vari-
ant against the background of what Taylor, following Gadamer, has called a
“fusion of horizons.”16
However, cosmopolitanism can also—somewhat more ambitiously—refer
to the idea that the norms of justice must ultimately be seen as governing the
worldwide community of human beings, without principled restrictions of a
communitarian or nationalist nature.17 This moral cosmopolitanism can be
very demanding in terms of dispositions, affects, intellect, and practice. The
question is, Could the city play a role in this type of “world citizenship” as
well? I believe it could, given that the two variants of “world citizenship”
are interrelated and could potentially enhance each other.
Contact with, and openness to, the culturally different can broaden our
horizon and include the formerly strange in a wider, more inclusive under-
standing and moral sense. The cultural cosmopolitan has to engage with dif-
ference and it is by doing so that the value of human life in a more general
sense becomes apparent.18 The relevance of the conceptual connection between
both types of cosmopolitanism is significant. If cultural cosmopolitanism is
supported by city life, with its inherent diversity of cultures and ethnicities,19
the city could potentially be a strategic site for the efforts to achieve global
justice. In other...