Intercultural Dialogue: Creating the New
Intercultural Dialogue: Creating the New will consider the strengths and current limitations of multiculturalism and how the dominant form of globalisation has exacerbated these shortcomings resulting in social fragmentation and polarisation on the urban edge, regardless of the immigration and nationality regime of different European countries.
Intercultural dialogue is broadly defined, not as a formal exchange of viewpoints between elite representatives, but as a dynamic process of negotiation in everyday life in ‘banal’ spaces of interaction. The paper will highlight symbolic ‘third’ spaces where people can encounter difference individually and as members of different groups in a process of mutual learning, play and imagining which allows them to revise their relationship to others, their identities, place and belonging. It will suggest how cities can change their perspective on immigration from seeing it as a problem to valuing it as an asset that can help revive democratic debate, stimulate cultural renewal and social, economic and civic innovation. Different strategies for creating spaces of interaction and animating dialogue, opening up and changing the composition of cultural institutions and the narratives they tell, fostering joint production projects will be outlined with examples drawn from European experiences. Finally policy implications will be drawn on how to facilitate the public presence of diverse groups and reflect this in the local economy, valorise multiple identities in new professional roles, spread intercultural literacy and competence in institutions and develop intercultural criteria for selecting, funding and evaluating projects.
Jude Bloomfield is an independent researcher on urban cultural planning and citizenship. She taught European politics and history at University College London for eight years and was a researcher on Comedia/Rowntree’s The Intercultural City – Making the Most of Diversity –from which her book Intercultural Innovators – learning from lifestories is forthcoming. Currently she is collaborating with the ERICArts Intercultural Dialogue and the Council of Europe Intercultural Cities projects. Recent publications include Planning for the Intercultural City (Comedia, 2004) Crossing the Rainbow, (www.ietm.org, October 2003) ;“’Made in Berlin’ Multicultural Conceptual Confusion and Intercultural Reality”, Journal of International Cultural Policy, October 2003.