Governing the multicultural city: Europe’s ‘great urban expectations’ facing austerity and resurgent nativism

Abstract

This article analyses European discourses on ‘optimal’ urban inclusion policies, as they are embodied in EU-sponsored city networking initiatives. Drawing from the scholarships on multiculturalism and urban austerity, it builds an inclusion agendas matrix that identifies four ideal-typical agendas for ethnic and racial inclusion: multicultural, diversity inclusion, community cohesion and neoliberalised diversity. It identifies a shift from group-based to individual-based concerns (mainstreaming) and from a politicised to a depoliticised approach to inclusion (depoliticising). It argues that (a) this double shift should be understood as the result of the mutually reinforcing pressures of nativism and austerity, and (b) inconsistencies in network discourses and policy advice suggest a pragmatic-adaptive logic that challenges simplistic understandings of cities as either (only) sites of resistance or (only) sites of full-blown accommodation of nativist and austerity imperatives.

‘Mainstreaming’ Meets ‘Choice and Control’: Unsettling Neoliberal Imaginaries of Service Choice

“…Critics of mainstreaming often highlight that its symbiosis with neoliberalism as a tool to rationalize service delivery, and implement austerity frameworks aimed at saving costs by integrating minorities in universal mainstream services, as opposed to tailored ‘specialist’ services for each minority group (Cianetti, 2019). Furthermore, while many universal basic mainstream service systems – such as transport, health and education–were once centrally funded and delivered by the state, processes of neoliberalisation have produced a privatised and more fragmented ‘mainstream s ’ landscape.…”

“…Mainstreaming has routinely led to the treatment of people with intellectual disability as secondary citizens in mainstream spaces, while it trivialised and dismissed relations and feelings of belonging that were meaningful to them in some ‘specialist’ spaces (Hall, 2010). Critics have also raised concern about mainstreaming as a guise for service rationalisation and privatisation in neoliberal regimes (see for example Cianetti, 2019, on social services mainstreaming more broadly).…”

Diversity-mainstreaming in times of ageing and migration: implementation paradoxes in municipal aged care provision

“…Boccagni 2015; Dobusch 2017) are tentatively positive towards diversity-mainstreaming policies is because they believe that such policies can create categories that are less essentializing and more sensitive to different dimensions of inequality, including educational level and socioeconomic background (Scholten, Collett, and Petrovic 2016;Dobusch 2017). Ambrosini and Boccagni (2015), Schiller (2015) and Cianetti (2020) found that local governments can pragmatically adopt the rhetoric of mainstreaming policies to include various facets of diversity. As such, diversity mainstreaming policies might be able to grant the crafting space to better respond to citizens' needs.…”

Ethnic prejudices and public support for anti-discrimination policies on the housing market

“…This multicultural backlash came along with a policy trend in which targeted -'racial' or 'colour-conscious'anti-discrimination measures were more and more abandoned in favour of more generic -'colour-blind'policies (Bleich, 2003;Bereni et al, 2020;Westerveen and Adam, 2019). The latter matches with the policy framework of 'mainstreaming' diversity, in which citizens are less considered as being part of ethniccultural groups and more as individuals who are increasingly super-diverse on many dimensions (Cianetti, 2020;Saeys et al, 2019;Westerveen and Adam, 2019). These policy changes occurred within a political context in which far-right political parties gained momentum in Europe (Mudde, 2019).…”