Suchergebnisse

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.

Drawing on interviews with 30 residents, users, and traders in Bankstown's town center, this article examines how built form facilitates a certain staging of the community, underpinning simulated encounters with the other. The article describes how the interviewees celebrate "differences" and "diversity" in their community, even as they reveal a certain indifference; signs of "difference" are substituted for genuine, reciprocal exchanges with the other, to the extent that the latter primarily appears in simulated form. Drawing on Baudrillard's concept of implosion, different ways in which otherness is simulated are discussed, ranging from programmed "cultural events" to staging of the other-as-victim.