Intercultural Citizenship in the Making: Public Space and Belonging in Discriminatory Environments

Abstract

Public space is essential to foster a sense of belonging among immigrants and racialized groups. This is especially true for groups who are still framed as different in relation to an abstract but taken-for-granted notion of we-ness that remains strongly connected to colonial thinking (Mayblin & Turner, 2021), according to which people perceived as white and western represent the norm in European societies. In this chapter we assume that there is an interrelation between the concepts of discrimination and interculturalism that is essential for the life conditions of immigrants and racialized groups. On the one hand, ethnic discrimination constitutes an impediment for the fulfilment of interculturalist policy goals, while on the other hand, interculturalism, understood as a strategy promoting contact among people from different backgrounds, including nationals, may potentially constitute a fruitful political and discursive tool to combat discrimination (Hellgren & Zapata-Barrero, 2022). In this chapter we defend that intercultural citizenship is a useful conceptual framework to analytically examine how such belonging could be constructed in multiethnic urban neighbourhoods, understanding multiplicity of linkages across ethnic divides as a key element. For such multiple ways of understanding contact (including formal/informal, conventional/unconventional, and also nonverbal communication, body language, eye contact, gestures and even silence (Samovar et al., 2015) to fulfil the conditions of citizenship-making and developing a sense of belonging need to take place under conditions of equality and power-sharing or be discrimination-free. We contend therefore that these people-to-place linkages in diversity settings are even more important than the probably more traditional people-to-people linkages that usually define interculturalism (Zapata-Barrero, 2017). For instance, migrants tend to use open public spaces, community gardens, and parks to gather and congregate in ways that are reminiscent of their home country, transforming the parks of their adoptive community into familiar spaces, creating an “autotopography” that links their daily practices and life experiences to a deep sense of place (Agyeman, 2017).