Equal but separate is not good enough: Why Britain should wake up to the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue in 2008

27 November 2007 Earthscan

Leading businesses have long known that to get ahead you have to mix things up. The former CEO of Royal Dutch/Shell Steve Miller says “you get some really neat ideas generated from creating a culture where people of different ethnicities, cultures, backgrounds, and countries come together. The best ideas come from this mosaic of players working together in a team on a project. They will come up with an answer that is different from what any one of them would have come up with individually.”

Steve Miller understands ‘diversity advantage’.

But it isn’t easy or straightforward. One of the less desirable side effects of mixing up people in a competitive environment is they can disagree, argue and sometimes even fight.

Now in the regulated conditions of an R & D or sales team these things can be managed but what about in the wider world? Say one of the larger European or North American cities? Too often in these cases the reality, whether by default or design, has been that people are kept apart.

But segregation is not only denying our societies the chance to realise Steve Miller’s insight for social and economic advantage - it doesn’t even work. Riots in the UK and France revealed that groups were leading parallel lives with little knowledge of, or empathy for, each other and that whilst this might have postponed trouble, it only increased in intensity the inevitable conflict.

The prevailing response of policy and media opinion has been disappointingly negative and defensive. That the migration which will fuel further diversification of our society should be viewed with suspicion; and that existing diverse communities must be portrayed at best as a bureaucratic encumbrance and at worst a potential threat to security or public order.

Even community cohesion policy, the UK government’s response to segregation and the riots doesn’t seem to get to the heart of the matter. At turns it can seem pious, imploring us all to get on because it’s a ‘good thing’, and paternalistic demanding adherence to some ideal of community and nation imposed from the past or from above. Nor does it really suggest that it is as incumbent on the majority as on the minority to adapt and accommodate.

What it also crucially lacks is any sense of the dynamic energy of our diverse society, in which the movement of people is matched by the interplay and trading of goods and services, ideas and customs, dreams and aspirations, fears and anxieties, skills and aptitudes as people make places, make money, make love, make families and make new identities within and across ethnic lines. The sense that we don’t simply live in a 'multi' cultural but an 'inter' cultural world.

The intercultural city of course is not always an easy place to be. Being an active citizen here demands that you engage and interact; that you question and are prepared to be questioned by others, that you listen and are listened to; and that you are not afraid to disagree but you will go the extra mile to work through and solve a conflict to get a common solution.

Some of the most exciting and innovative parts of London, Amsterdam, New York and Toronto – but also some of their most nurturing neighbourhoods – are at the forefront of this new trend for intercultural urban spaces.

You may at this point be starting to think you quite like the sound of this ‘intercultural’ thing and may be wondering why you haven’t heard more about it. Well you soon will be because 2008 has been designated the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue by those occasionally far-sighted folks in Brussels. Sadly, you may be hearing rather less if you live on the British side of the Channel. Search through government plans for 2008 and you’ll find virtually no mention apart from a page tucked away on the Department of Culture, Media and Sports’s website. The new Equality and Human Rights Commission and the government’s recent Commission on Integration and Cohesion have had virtually nothing to say about it either.

The British emphasis on rights, equality and community is of course based on decades of important and admirable work which has made UK the special place it is today, but does this sometimes blind us to good ideas from elsewhere, or even from under our noses? In our self-absorption might we be missing out on the next direction that the world’s leading cities are already taking?

This is the case made by Charles Landry and I make in our new book The Intercultural City: Planning for Diversity Advantage. Drawing on inspirational people and practical examples from places as diverse as Vancouver, Rotterdam and Madrid as well as London, we have come to the conclusion that whilst doing what Steve Miller advocates is a tougher ask in a city than it is at Shell, it is not only possible but absolutely essential. Most places are still not doing enough to realise their own latent diversity advantage, but helpfully the book is full of tools and down-to-earth techniques to encourage them to try.

We offer, for example, the intercultural lens. Local professionals – say a teacher or a town planner – can use this to take a fresh perspective on the work they do and ask themselves ‘if cross-cultural interaction and diversity advantage were a priority in this city, how would I do my job differently?’ For policymakers looking to drive forward such new priorities we have devised indicators of openness and interculturalism to gauge how far they have come and what lies ahead. Drawing on effective policies we have seen in various cities, we end the book with ‘10 steps to an intercultural city’.

Step one is surely to use 2008 as the chance to deepen and broaden the debate beyond the usual lobby groups, and start to involve ordinary people in making mixing a better option than separation in their neighbourhoods and workplaces.

Many of the ideas and projects discussed in the book will also be at the centre of an international conference which is being planned by the authors to mark the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue in the UK. The Intercultural Cities Conference will be held on 1 & 2 May 2008 in Liverpool, the European Capital of Culture. To register your interest in the conference and to keep abreast of programme announcements please go to http://inter.culture.info/ICC