Abstract
In major cities across the world policy-makers are searching for new ways to represent and govern their increasingly diverse populations. In this paper we analyse the ways in which authorities in two global cities, London and Toronto, have drawn on corporate, public management, strategies as their principal mode of diversity governance. In both we see a shift in policy making as a conscious attempt to reframe and re-imagine cities as corporate-like structures that can be conceptualised, represented, and managed through the lens of diversity management. In both cities specific representations of the city and its populations are curated to fulfil wider policy objectives. City governments present both as iconic centres of diversity, super-diversity or hyper-diversity, that embody and represent an era of progressive globalisation and new forms of contemporary cosmopolitan living. The presence of diversity is celebrated and seen a key component of ‘success agendas’. This paper is based on empirical evidence derived from a policy-oriented research project in both cities. Policy analysis and critical discourse analysis are conducted in both cities on the basis of review of policy documents at national, local and community scales, and interviews with policy makers. The paper first frames diversity as a technology of description, where we explain how diversity has become a curation strategy in public management within the framework of growing mobility of management frameworks and shifts in framing diversity in urban policies. We will then provide a comparative analysis of London and Toronto.
Highlights
In major cities across the world policy-makers are searching for new ways to represent and govern their increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan populations
Diversity discourses can be seen as a new corporatized version of cosmopolitanism, that enables policy-makers to bypass structural issues such racism and inequalities, and instead, focus on operational terminologies over the presence or absence ‘of diversity’ amongst population groups and labour markets (Bhanot 2015). This shift displays a form of bridging institutional entrepreneurship, which, according to management literature, allows combining aspects of established institutional logics to create new forms of hybrid logics (Tracey et al 2011). From this point of view, we argue that while diversity is curated as a public celebration through new forms of hybrid logics, a PM approach is deployed to allow policy makers to downplay issues like growing inequality, polarization and poverty along racial and ethnic lines in each city; or to put selective emphasises on other social phenomena
In this article we have shown that diversity is curated in global cities, such as London and Toronto, by reframing existing discourses mainly around social-cultural and ethnic diversity to promote multiple governance agendas: first, to draw on management systems and technologies to establish new and selective representations of the cities as centres of ‘diversity’; second, to give a new look to the success agenda of increasingly entrepreneurial urban governance primarily to external investors and mobile consumers; and third to implement new governance programmes that are designed to create a ‘role-model’ or ‘beacon’ status on behalf of the city’s governing authorities and Mayors
Summary
In major cities across the world policy-makers are searching for new ways to represent and govern their increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan populations. The emphasis on curation as taken from the private sector seems to address a number of governance problems simultaneously: meeting increasingly diverse social and cultural and welfare needs; promoting economic growth; and generating new forms of engagement and inclusivity While these policy frames are presented as inclusive and empowering, the real challenges of responding to the diverse claims of increasingly complex urban societies are hidden behind them. The Strategy represents a set of tensions between the need to establish compartmentalised, structured and closed systems of governmental practice to be managed and the realisation that the objectives of diversity planning are stretched so broadly that the number of policy fields has multiplied Their plurality includes mixed housing, small business premises and support networks, poverty reduction, education and skills provision, quality training, enhanced community and citizen engagement, accessible labour markets, affordable transport networks, and the impacts of crime and security. Communities have taken on the role of acting as both the subjects and objects of policy with the objective of creating an ‘empathetic city’, in which greater tolerance and understanding will ‘ensure that our growing diversity strengthens, rather than erodes, the social fabric of our neighbourhoods’ (Mayor of London 2018, p.5)
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