In an article written in 2000, I posed what I called 'the Multicultural question'. It runs something like this: What are the chances that we can construct in our cities shared, diverse, just, and egalitarian forms of common life, guaranteeing the full rights of democratic citizenship and participation to all on the basis of equality, whilst respecting the differences which inevitably come about when peoples of different religions, cultures, histories, languages, and traditions are obliged to live together in the same shared space?
At the time, despite the many evident tensions of modern city life, it was plausible to believe that the contemporary metropolitan city - cities like my own home, London - might be able to offer the model of a workable form of ethnic inter-culture, predicated on a practical cosmopolitanism. The outlook now, four years and a 'war on terror' later, is much less optimistic. The promise of the city, which David Theo Goldberg argues for in his contribution to this debate, is increasingly looking a broken one, and it is time to name the forces which are articulated together in a process which is sub-dividing shared space into discrete, differentiated warring enclaves, before it is too late. My argument, though it applies to many cities across across the world, will be focussed largely on the city I know best, London.
