What difference does ‘difference’ make? Identity, difference and the multicultural city

Abstract

This paper draws on the work of Jean Baudrillard to critique the manner in which notions of ‘identity’ and ‘difference’ are employed in understandings of the multicultural city. It begins with an overview of ways in which ethnicity is construed in the planning literature on multicultural cities. This is followed by discussion of Baudrillard’s contention that the basic terms of engagement with multiculturalism, ‘identity’ and ‘difference’, are problematic in so far as they mirror the fundamental means by which discrimination is effected in capitalist societies. It is argued that, in some cases, commentators on the multicultural city merely rehearse and entrench certain of capitalism’s key ideological ‘alibis’; in other cases, commentators present as critical insights what Baudrillard might regard as normative descriptions of the current machinations of capitalism.