Much has been said about diversity and coexistence in public spaces, but there remains a silence on the very nature of incorporation within the spatial negotiations and transformations these involve. This paper examines the spatial and political implications of inclusion by identifying two key strands of geographical imaginations on urban diversity: co-presence and togetherness and the incorporation of difference and diversity in everyday shared spaces. I aim to retain critical analytical purchase on what living with difference in shared spaces – specifically through ‘inclusion’ – means. Focusing on Asian urban contexts, I illustrate how measures of inclusion can carry out the political work of what form belonging takes and, consequently, who does and does not belong in diversifying cities. Conceptually, this demonstrates how, in the Asian context, the politics of urban diversification are intertwined with the politics of labour to the extent that diversity in everyday shared spaces is shaped by the structuring of migrant labour incorporation.
This paper contributes to the recent interest by geographers on urban diversity and encounters and is motivated by the significance of living with difference in grounded, prosaic ways. I situate co-existence with strange others in shared public spaces through the interrogation of fleeting, prosaic ways people manage such diversity in their everyday encounters. Drawing on ethnographic data based on Singapore's neighbourhood of Jurong West, I expand on a politics of diversity that acknowledges distance, limitations and ambivalence among people who are personally unknown to one another. I develop the notion of the familiar stranger as a way to interrogate the potentials and limitations of coexisting with difference, where positive and strained relations can occur simultaneously. Rather than demanding cohesion and integration, I argue that a far more open form of coexistence would acknowledge these kinds of sociality that do not force people to engage beyond the present precisely so that diversity can become unremarkable and everyday. In this sense, this paper argues for a non-prescriptive way of understanding coexisting with difference where exchanges of ambivalent and fleeting nature can pave the way for a politics of breathable diversity.
This paper interrogates processes of everyday urban diversification by challenging dominant narratives of “diversity” and “integration”. I address the management aspects of urban diversification through the normative and productive categorisations of race, citizenship and civility in shared spaces to highlight the forms of differential inclusion of newcomers, drawing upon ethnographic data from Jurong West in Singapore, to explain subjective inclusion through state-led measures and everyday forms of coexistence. There are two key aspects of differential inclusion discussed here: a) the explicit rules that form the basis of differential state treatment of its population by race, ethnicity and citizenship status and b) the implicit principles in which migrants are included according to normative forms of appropriate behaviour in public spaces. Consequently, social norms and civility become tools of inclusion, and, relationally, exclusion, producing a politicised logic of managing diversity both in structural and everyday spaces. Recognising the profound ways in which differential inclusion shapes space through its subtle yet pervasive ways not only imparts analytical purchase to the study of everyday interactions but also grafts the meaning of belonging and difference onto the ever-changing contours of diversification in the city.
Geographers and other social scientists have developed ways to describe and analyse people's routine and fleeting encounters with others in cities experiencing migrant‐led diversification. Much of this work illuminates the significance of everyday rubbing along, but how diversity is lived and negotiated through specific principles of interaction and exchange has so far remained obscure. As such, the politics of fleeting encounters in public spaces have not been explained. Further, the overwhelming majority of conceptualisations of coexistence draw from European and North American contexts. Through an empirically grounded analysis of the principles of social organisation (known as gui ju in Singapore), I demonstrate that everyday norms of civility emerge as ways of boundary‐breaking and boundary‐making in shared spaces in Singapore's Jurong West. Addressing the potentials and limitations of coexisting with difference, I clarify how diversity is managed and negotiated in the everyday vis‐à‐vis uneven interconnections between people of different backgrounds. I discuss the prosaic and situated ways in which positive and strained relations can occur simultaneously and situate these in a wider structural context. I argue that the geography of coexistence is constituted through socio‐spatial processes where the politics of living with diversity are mediated through, although not limited to, fleeting encounters. Gui ju clarifies the messiness inherent in shared spaces and, effectively, filter and curtail diversity by perpetuating the normativities of acceptable behaviour in public.
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