ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some features and challenges of diversity-thinking that focuses on recognition of identity in the city. It presents alternative ways of considering diversity, in which heterogeneity in the urban population is viewed as different social groups in interaction, together, rather than singling groups out for separate scrutiny. Racism as a judgmental practice able to be identified in the workplace is discursively and imaginatively less obvious, somehow, once diversity is an institutional norm. Critical writings on urban diversity are generally hostile toward separation and confinement as strategies for dealing with the messy diversity and disorder of city life. Encounter is a frame of reference that positions interactions as the centerpiece of the analysis of urban diversity and its planning. It emphasizes the importance of bodily presence, of physical and material togetherness, emplaced and in the moment, and the contingency of the outcomes that might ensue.
