ABSTRACT
In this defence of his controversial novel, Salmon Rushdie staked out some of the territory that I want to cover in this chapter. I want to use the metaphor of the mongrel city to characterize an emerging urban condition in which difference, otherness, multiplicity, heterogeneity, diversity and plurality prevail. For some this is to be feared, signifying
the decline of civilization as we know it in the West. For others it is to be celebrated as a great possibility: the possibility of living alongside others who are different, learning from them, creating new worlds with them, instead of fearing them. My recent project has been to provide a better understanding of the emergence of cities of difference in the context of globalization and other related social forces; and to reflect on the challenges which these mongrel cities present in the twenty-first century to the city-building professions (architects, planners and urban designers, landscape architects, engineers), to city dwellers, and to conventional notions of citizenship (Sandercock 2003). My central question is how can ‘we’, (all of us), in all of our differences, be ‘at home’ in the increasingly multicultural and multiethnic cities of the twenty-first century? Or, as James Donald (1999) puts it more vigorously, how can we stroppy strangers live together in these (mongrel) cities without doing each other too much violence? That seems to me to be the central and defining question for a cosmopolitan urbanism.
