ABSTRACT
Culture seems to have become increasingly central to processes of economic change in the city. The cultural and creative industries have come to play ever more significant roles in the economic development of cities recently. Urban geography's involvement within the cultural turn is a little less emphatic. Policies such as the designation of cultural quarters have been designed to explicitly emphasize the cultural qualities and distinctiveness of cities or spaces therein. When thinking about culture in the city we can also make a distinction between the manufacture and manipulation of culture for some external economic or social developmental end, and organic cultures. Despite the impression that might emerge from the media, mongrel cities tend to be overwhelmingly characterized by tolerance, rather than hostility, between different cultural groups. While tolerance is undeniably preferable to hostility, it tends, in contemporary cities of the Global North, to be a kind of indifferent tolerance rather than an active engagement with cultural diversity.
