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.
With regard to continental Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, less than 10 percent of the population lived in cities of 10,000 or more. By the mid-1980s, the urban population exceeded 70 percent. Taking the world as a whole, in 1800 no more than 2.5 percent of the population lived in cities of 20,000 or more. By this measure, since 2007 more than half of the world’s population lives in urban conditions. Cities of more than 1 million inhabitants numbered 16 in 1900 and 250 in 1985. Some of these cities have developed into "metacities" of more than 20 million people. Britannica Online Encyclopedia, "The Nature of Modern Society: Urbanism as a Way of Life," http://search.eb.com/ eb/article-12023 (accessed December 10, 2008). UN-Habitat report, State of the World’s Cities 2006/7 (London: Earthscan Publications, 2006).
2.
Kingsley Davis, "The Urbanization of the Human Population," in The City Reader, ed. Richard LeGates and Frederic Stout (London: Routledge, 2003), 26.
3.
Ibid., 27.
4.
James Holston, ed., Cities and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press , 1999); Engin Isin, ed., Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City ( London: Routledge, 2000).
5.
Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," in Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism (New York: Palgrave , 2000), 340.
6.
Axel Honneth, "Anerkennung und moralische Verpflichtung," Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 51 (1997): 25-41. Though sensitive to urban settings, see also Iris Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1990 ), chap. 6.
7.
Alan McKee, The Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 159.
8.
For a comparable interpretation of moral minimalism, although within the context of a different argument and focus, see Veit Bader, Secularism or Democracy? (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), §2.2 and §6.1.
9.
The notion "city-zen" pops up in recent texts on urbanization, such as the UN-Habitat report State of the World’s Cities 2006/7. It generally denotes belonging to a city or urban area in a juridical, political, and socio-existential sense.
10.
René Maunier, "The Definition of the City," American Journal of Sociology, 15 ( 1910): 536-48.
11.
Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity (New York: Colombia University Press, 1992), 173ff.; Steve Pile, "The Heterogeneity of Cities," in Unruly Cities?: Order/Disorder (Understanding Cities), ed. Chris Brook, Gerry Mooney, and Steve Pile (London: Routledge, 1999).
12.
Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 238-40.
13.
Sennett, The Uses of Disorder (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), xvii, 109.
14.
Richard Dagger , "Metropolis, Memory and Citizenship," in Isin, Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City.
15.
Robert Dahl , "The City in the Future of Democracy," The American Political Science Review, 61 ( 1967): 953-70.
16.
Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," 67 ff.
17.
For the conceptual distinction between the cultural and the moral type of cosmopolitanism, see Samuel Scheffler, "Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism,"Utilitas, 11 (1999): 255-76.
18.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 222. Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
19.
See Jon Binnie, Julian Holloway, Steve Millington, Craig Young, eds., Cosmopolitan Urbanism ( London: Routledge, 2006).
20.
Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
21.
Jörg Dürrschmidt , "The Delinking of Locale and Milieu," in Living the Global City, ed. J. Eade ( London: Routledge, 1997), 57.
22.
Georg Simmel , "The Metropolis and Mental Life," in Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, ed. Richard Sennett (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1903/1969), 52.
23.
Louis Wirth, "Urbanism as a Way of Life," in Metropolis, ed. Philip Kasinitz (New York : Palgrave, 1938/1995 ), 68.
24.
E.g., Herbert Gans, "Urbanism and Suburbanism as Ways of Life ," in Kasinitz, Metropolis, 170-195.
25.
Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye (New York: Norton, 1990), 127; Cf. Richard Sennett , Flesh and Stone (New York : Norton, 1994), 355-70.
26.
Fran Tonkiss , "The Ethics of Indifference," International Journal of Cultural Studies, 6 (2003).
27.
Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962).
28.
Robert Park, "The City," in The City, ed. Robert Park and Ernest Burgess ( Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1925/1967), 40.
29.
Sennett, Flesh and Stone, 368.
30.
Although the segregation of the Black population in the United States is more dramatic than it is in continental Europe, "tendencies [are] moving in the direction of the pattern in the United States." Peter Marcuse, "Cities in Quarters," in A Companion to the City, ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Malden: Blackwell, 2000), 278.
31.
Margo Trappenburg , "Against Segregation: Ethnic Mixing in Liberal States,"The Journal of Political Philosophy, 11 (2003): 295-319.
32.
Victor Vroom’s Work and Motivation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1995/1964) argues that, basically, two types of expectancies are crucial for people to act in a certain way: first, that a certain level of performance (e.g., selling five cars a week) leads to a valued outcome (e.g., getting a promotion); second, that one is capable of delivering this level of performance. To motivate, both expectancies should be perceived as realistic. Although Vroom’s theory has been criticized, the empirical support for expectancy theory is fairly positive, particularly regarding the impact of expectancy on motivation. Moreover, this type of theory (value theory) is not strictly limited to work motivation. It is relevant as well for basic moral values. Edwin Locke and Douglas Henne, "Work Motivation Theories," in International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, ed. Cary Cooper and Ivan Robertson (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1986).
Ash Amin, "Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity," Environment and Planning A 34 (2002): 959-80; Leonie Sandercock, Cosmopolis II (London: Continuum, 2003); Phil Wood and Charles Landry, The Intercultural City (London: Earthscan, 2008).
37.
Amin, "Ethnicity and the Multicultural City," 967.
38.
Ibid., 969.
39.
Ibid., 969-70.
40.
Ibid., 971.
41.
See for more practical examples: Wood and Landry, The Intercultural City, chap. 8; Sandercock, Cosmopolis II, chaps. 7, 8. Often, these activities revolve around neighborhood regeneration and improvement, as is the case with the Community Fire Station in Birmingham that Sandercock analyses (142 ff.).
42.
I am indebted to Rudi Visker here, author of The Inhuman Condition: Looking for Difference after Levinas and Heidegger (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004).
43.
Wood and Landry provide a telling example concerning the commitment of their book: "The Intercultural City argues that we should interact more with each other because we live side by side" (p. 5). In other words: "a passive state of ‘benign indifference’ is not a sufficient or desirable state." Wood and Landry, The Intercultural City, 5, 313.
44.
As Sandercock wrongly suggests (Cosmopolis II, 87-88).
45.
Nathalie Schippers and Danny Wildemeersch, "Dealing with Difference on the Shop Floor," in Democratic Practices as Learning Opportunities , ed. Ruud van der Veen and Janet W. Youngblood (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2007), 170, 174.
46.
Bryan Turner , "Cosmopolitan Virtue," in Isin, Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City, 131, 142.
47.
Thomas Marshall , Citizenship and Social Class ( London: Pluto Press, 1950/ 1992). For example, Kymlicka’s groundbreaking Multicultural Citizenship is, as expressed in the subtitle, a plea for "a liberal theory of minority rights." Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), italics mine. In many ways, Kymlicka has set the tone for this debate . See also Will Kymlicka, ed., The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Joseph Carens, Culture, Citizenship and Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Ayelet Shachar, Multicultural Jurisdictions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). A different meaning of "multicultural citizenship" has been neglected, namely concerning the question what kind of citizens increasingly diverse societies presuppose. To be clear, the point is not to reject the legalistic interpretation of multicultural citizenship, but to supplement it. Kymlicka has recently paid more attention to the ethical dimension as well: Will Kymlicka, "Multicultural States and Intercultural Citizens," Theory and Research in Education1, no. 2 (2003): 147-69.
48.
Kymlicka, "Multicultural States and Intercultural Citizens"; Charles Taylor, Reconciling the Solitudes (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993).
49.
Bart van Leeuwen , "A Formal Recognition of Social Attachments ," Inquiry50 ( 2007): 180-205.
50.
Stanley Milgram , "The Experience of Living in Cities," Science167 (1970): 1461-68.
51.
Claude Fischer , "The Public and Private Worlds of City Life ," American Sociological Review46 (1981): 306-16; Milgram , "The Experience of Living in Cities."
52.
The thesis is questionable for those who refuse to make a sharp distinction between "behavior" (especially if it has a structural character) and "personality."
53.
Take for instance the general indifference of New Yorkers to the stunt of someone parachuting from a 110-story building. Joyce Wadler: "So You Parachute from 110 Stories up; in New York City, Who’s Going to Notice?" The Washington Post, September 22, 1980, First Section. To this extent, one can define the "true metropolis" with Peter Berger "as a place where an individual can march down the street wearing a purple robe and a hat with bells on it, beating a drum and leading an elephant by the leach, and only get casual glances from passers-by." Peter Berger, "New York City 1976," in Facing up to Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1970), 265.
54.
The "body management" of the city dweller is often geared toward the creation of a "symbolic shield of privacy," the point of which is "to make very clear that one is not open for interaction." Lyn Lofland, A World of Strangers (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 140, 146-47. Lofland’s description of urban waiting styles provides an excellent illustration (146 ff.).
55.
Sennett, Flesh and Stone, 366; Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire (London: Verso, 1983), 117.
56.
Tonkiss, "The Ethics of Indifference," 301, 298-300.
57.
Ibid., 301. Gilloch’s interpretation of Benjamin’s attraction to the "thrill of anonymity" is illuminating in this regard: "In the crowd the modern individual could lose himself, could disappear without a trace. The crowd becomes the hiding-place of modernity, the haunt of the bohemian and the fugitive." Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996) 142.
58.
Fran Tonkiss rightly refers to Iris Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference with regard to the expression "side-by-side" in this regard. Tonkiss, "The Ethics of Indifference," p. 303, 309. (Young speaks of "side-by-side particularity." Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 238.) Tonkiss, however, develops this notion further and more specifically in terms of an acceptable urban indifference; she is less inclined toward an urban cosmopolitanism than Young is.
59.
Zygmunt Bauman , City of Fears, City of Hopes ( London: Goldsmiths College, 2003 ), 6-8.
60.
Marcel Coenders , Marcel Lubbers, and Peer Scheepers, Majorities’ Attitudes towards Minorities in European Union Member States ( Nijmegen: Nijmegen Institute for Social and Cultural Research, 2005), vi.
61.
Tonkiss, "The Ethics of Indifference," 300.
62.
Not being indifferent to the basic needs of co-citizens can take many different forms: from a mere feeling of discomfort when confronted with the misery of co-citizens-for instance, of those living on the city streets-to a full-blown commitment to assist the poor and the needy by doing voluntary work. Non-indifference, however, has certain practical limitations within modern cities: "If a citizen attended to every needy person, if he were sensitive to and acted on every altruistic impulse that was evoked in the city, he could scarcely keep his own affairs in order." Milgram, "The Experience of Living in Cities," 1463.
63.
René Boomkens, Een Drempelwereld (Rotterdam: Nai , 1998), 412.
64.
Simmel makes this mistake by extending the blasé attitude to a pathological devaluation of the world, in which nothing has any particular value any more for the city-dweller. This devaluation eventually includes the loss of a sense of self-worth. Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," 52.
65.
Wolfgang Welsch, "Ästhetik und Anästhetik," in Ästhetik im Widerstreit, ed. Wolfgang Welsch and Christine Pries (Weinheim: Acta Humaniora, 1991).
66.
Herman van Gunsteren, A Theory of Citizenship (Oxford: Westview, 1998), 138.
67.
Susan Bickford , "City Spaces and the Architecture of Citizenship ," Political Theory28 ( 2000): 355-76.
68.
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London: Penguin, 1974), part 4.
69.
Bernhard Waldenfels , "Kulturelle und sociale Fremdheit," in Vielstimmigkeit der Rede, ed. Bernhard Waldenfels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999).
70.
Jennifer Robinson , Ordinary Cities (London: Routledge, 2006), 51ff.
71.
These are Granovetter’s examples of social ties that fall outside his notion of "weak ties." Given my stress on the importance of the moral minimum, however, I do include them. Mark Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties,"American Journal of Sociology78 (1973), 1361.
72.
Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, 39.
73.
Lofland, A World of Strangers .
74.
Bauman, "City of Fears, City of Hopes," 5.
75.
See the work of Erving Goffman for numerous fine-grained descriptions of these small, mundane rituals.
76.
Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, 34ff.
77.
Ibid., 5.
78.
Ibid., 264-65.
79.
Ibid., 265.
80.
Ibid., 266, 297, 306-7, 309, 310. Sennett works with a false opposition between a sense of community at the local level and a meaningful, wider public sphere. This abstract opposition seems the consequence of his tendency to neglect the fact that the public-private distinction should be understood in terms of a continuum.
81.
Iris Young , "Residential Segregation and Differentiated Citizenship,"Citizenship Studies, 3 (1999): 237-52.
82.
Nancy Fraser , "Rethinking the Public Sphere," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press , 1992), 123.
83.
Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 81. Taylor even uses the notion "common mind" quite often in this context: see chap. 6.
84.
As Veit Bader puts it: "Practices like sati, domestic violence, stranger-rape, marital rape, sexual abuse, genital mutilation, honor killing and forced collective suicide are surely incompatible with the most minimalist interpretations of basic rights to life and bodily integrity." Veit Bader, "Associative Democracy and Minorities within Minorities," in Minorities within Minorities , ed. Avigail Eisenberg and Jeff Spinner-Halev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 328.
85.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: The Modern Library, 1961), 38.
86.
Bart van Leeuwen , "On the Affective Ambivalence of Living with Cultural Diversity," Ethnicities8 (2008): 147-76.
87.
Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 38-39.
88.
Ibid., 45.
89.
Nancy L.a Vigne, Crime Prevention through the Design and Management of the Built Environment (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1996), 8.
90.
Robert O’Block , Joseph F. Donnermeyer, and Stephen E. Doeren, Security and Crime Prevention (Stoneham: Butterworth-Heinemann , 1991), 359.
91.
Today, many city streets have artificial eyes upon them, namely, CCTV surveillance, even to such an extent that "it has become the standard way to restrain crime and guarantee security." Hille Koskela, "Video Surveillance, Gender, and the Safety of Public Urban Space," Urban Geography 23 (2002), 259. Unfortunately, these electronic eyes upon the street are often put to the service of commercial interests and as such tend to purify urban space of anything likely to provoke discomfort, like "begging and vagrants or ‘suspicious youths.’" Nicholas Fyfe and Jon Bannister, "The Eyes upon the Street," in Images of the Street, ed. Nicholas Fyfe (London: Routledge, 1998), 262.
92.
Interview in Philip Hermans, " De beleving van racisme door Marokkaanse jonte Brussel," in Racisme, ed. Ludo Abicht, Jaak Billiet, Hans De Witte en Philip Hermans (Brussel: Cultuur en Migratie, 1991), 82, my translation.
