ABSTRACT
The value to be placed on living together, engaging and mixing in cities of difference is the object of some dispute. Beyond the vacuous city marketing call to ‘celebrate difference’, which seems shallow post-11 September, lies a tension between a perceived need for deliberate healthy indifference in cities and the value placed on the mutual learning to be obtained from an active cosmopolitanism. Allen, for example, argues, drawing on the writings of Simmel, that mutual forms of distancing may be necessary to coexistence. Settings of indifference are not necessarily bad:
Because cities are places where all manner of different people live in close
proximity, their relative ‘strangeness’ to one another may simply be a condition
of city life. In other words rather than close themselves off to one another,
different kinds of people may negotiate their social distance from others as
part of going about their daily business and coping with whatever comes their
way. Even though they may share the same spaces and facilities in the city,
therefore, they may do so without there being a felt need to assert their
difference (Allen, 1999: 91-2).
