Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the commodification of diversity in two multicultural neighbourhoods in Amsterdam and Rome, and how it was used by both institutional and white, civil-society actors as a tool to develop a local tourism industry and further neoliberal urban reforms leading to gentrification.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the commodification of diversity in two so-called multicultural neighbourhoods in Amsterdam and Rome, and how it was used by both institutional and white, civil-society actors as a tool to develop a local tourism industry and thus further neoliberal urban reforms leading to rampant gentrification. These neighbourhoods have historically been home to sizeable Muslim immigrant minorities, a thing which won them the reputation of "failed" and criminalised urban spaces in need of physical, commercial, and demographic restructuration. Recent efforts to regenerate these areas have explicitly targeted local manifestations of cultural difference - "ethnic" shops in Amsterdam, and Bangladeshi basement mosques in Rome - with the explicit goal of commodifying them as heritage to be sold to white, middle-class visitors during guided urban tours. While allegedly fostering intercultural dialogue and celebrating multicultural diversity, these tours operate a spectacle of cultural difference and provide visitors with curated 'multicultural atmospheres' (Ricatti&Bartoloni 2015) that reduce racialised others to sensuous objects for white consumption. Such commodification of diversity, I argue, has been functional for the affective resignification of the two neighbourhoods as sites of pleasure and consumption for white visitors and consumers. I conclude that these tours can be viewed as violent tools of control of non-white bodies and spaces that (re)confirm the white subject as the prime occupier of space and aesthetic organising principle of the neighbourhoods' landscape, and raise questions about the role of urban sensory politics in the revaluation of multicultural neighbourhoods like the Indische Buurt and Tor Pignattara.