Radical Alterity, Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Spatial Planning and Super Diversity in Bankstown, Sydney

Abstract

<p>With the rise of globalisation and associated movements of people, goods and money around the world, cities have become home to increasingly diverse multi-ethnic populations. The resultant multicultural spaces often involve concentrations in specific locations of people from a wide variety of cultural, ethnic and social backgrounds. Ways in which issues arising from this diversity are - and ‘should be’ - negotiated in multicultural societies have been explored from a variety of theoretical and empirical angles in a large literature emanating from geography, sociology and cognate disciplines (including, to a somewhat lesser extent, spatial planning). Across this literature it is now a commonplace to decry words and actions that suggest processes of ‘othering’. To combat racism, ‘differences’ must be substituted for ‘others’ and the former lauded or, at a minimum, understood. But what if the opposite were the case? What if racism is founded on ‘difference’ and the intelligibility of the ‘other’? Such is the daring hypothesis posed by French theorist Jean Baudrillard, leading him to advance the concept of ‘radical alterity’ as antidote - a form of ‘otherness’ that is beyond comparison and positioning, a kind of singularity that undoes the identity/difference dichotomy. In this dissertation, Baudrillard’s notion of radical alterity is explored in the context of the built environment, used to shed light on ways in which built form influences experiences and perceptions of ethnicity in public space. Its particular focus is on town centres within the ‘super diverse’ local government area of Bankstown in the western suburbs of Sydney, Australia. Primary methods include semi-structured interviews with users and traders in the centres, GIS mapping of key built environment variables, and archival searches of spatial planning codes and policies. In the analysis of these data, the dissertation argues that aspects of spatial practice and built form function as both foil and facilitator for the identity/difference dichotomy. They at once furnish a myriad marginal differences (read as signs of ethnic identity/difference), even as they introduce indissolubly undecidable elements which allow for a form of otherness that is not merely different. </p>