Contemporary Urban Space and the Intercultural City

More and more cities worldwide are embedded within global networks, inevitably experiencing international migration and a resulting pluralization and complexification of their societies. This condition raises challenging questions for researchers and policy makers alike, such as: If the encounter of cultures and the capacity to create new ideas it entails have always contributed to socio-economic development, why is encounter hardly taken by policy making as a condition worth being explicitly embraced? What should we actually understand by the expression ‘being a citizen’ and which new or revitalized meanings could (or should) citizenship take on in contemporary glocal territories? What is ‘public space’ in pluralistic cities where the demands and uses of public space incessantly multiply and often enter into conflict? Is there just one public space? Would it be better if we reconsidered the very notion of public space, rather speaking about ‘public spaces’? According to Balbo the fundamental challenge policy makers are confronted with nowadays is to make citizenship rights, public spaces and urban assets in general accessible to diversity. Otherwise one of the likely results would be to render migrants invisible, either ‘actively’ as a strategy they could be forced to adopt in order to avoid problems, or ‘passively’ as an imposition dictated by dominant groups which pushes them into marginal, out of sight (working, residential, public) spaces.