Indigeneity and the intercultural city

Abstract

The historical erasure of Aboriginality from the settler city has now been well documented by Australian postcolonial scholarship. The increasing cultural diversity of cities such as Sydney, however, pushes Aboriginal claims to place beyond the now familiar settler/Aboriginal dichotomy and into a more culturally complex context. Through an empirical case study of Aboriginal participation in urban planning on Sydney's western fringe this article examines Aboriginal place in the intercultural city. Drawing on scholarship on interculturalism, Aboriginal participation in Sydney's urban planning is examined through the dual rights criteria: the right to difference and the right to the city. In addition, the research data also served to build on this criteria, gesturing towards a potential third condition for an intercultural city: the identification of issues such as urban sustainability that create common ground, connecting the city's diverse population. Rather than a return to a homogenizing ‘common good’, this article argues that the adoption of a more intercultural ethos in urban planning requires a re-visioning of the city from an exclusionary colonial urbanism to an amalgamation of diverse ways of life and land use that together will sustain its population into the future.