Paper short abstract:

Accommodating cultural diversity has been one of the focus of local cultural policies and urban planning. Comparing two “diversity festivals” we seek to understand how interculturality fits urban planning strategies and is discursively produced with a view to create a certain image of the city.

Paper long abstract:

Issues of cultural diversity governance have been on the agenda with regard to urban paradigms that seek to accommodate the diversity driven by a globalized world. Globalization replaced nation states by cities as the main nodes in the systems of cultural and capital flows. This new urbanscapes feature particular conditions of interaction corresponding to what Wise (2006) termed "quotidian transversality". The space where the contact zones unfold in everyday practices is not, however, as free floating and spontaneous as Wise suggests. By looking into the production of two "diversity festivals" we contend that this space is not just constructed in interaction but it is intersected by systemic forces outside its supposedly inherent practical rituals and negotiations. Such forces range from urban planning, hosting policies, strategies of political actors as well as the market which are all intertwined in what we call the space of interculturality. The space of interculturality should be understood as a space of practices, that is a nexus of interdependent practices that comprises not only actions as well as discourses (as language practices), institutions (constraining and facilitating both actions and practices) articulated into cultural repertoires mobilized by actors to interpret the social world. Methodologically the research comprehended a mix between a multi-situated ethnography and traditional qualitative sociological research. Comparison was carried out between a neighborhood in downtown Lisbon and Granada.