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ABSTRACT: Difference is a hallmark of cities. The size and density of urban populations means they are sites of proximity where all sorts of people are brought together. This issue of diversity and juxtaposition has been at the heart of geographical attempts to understand urban life. This article traces the way 'difference' has been understood by geographers from being synonymous with fear of otherness in the 1970s and 1980s, to being celebrated as the hallmark of cosmopolitanism in the 21st century. It then goes onto question whether proximity and urban encounters in the context of contemporary super mobility and super diversity represent a new form of urban citizenship. In doing so, the article challenges the assumptions of some cosmopolitan writing that contact with difference necessarily translates into respect for difference, and reflects on potential ways that such progressive social transformation might be achieved.
Introduction
At the beginning of the 20th century a group of scholars - most famously Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Roderick McKenzie - carried out detailed studies of where different kinds of people lived in the city. They became known as The Chicago School of Human Ecology because they used an analogy with plant communities to interpret the residential patterns of Chicago and to develop a theory of how 'natural communities' emerge in cities. This work was very influential in geography in the 1970s and led to the development of techniques to map segregation within cities on the basis of ethnicity and class (e.g. Peach, 1975). However, this work was heavily criticised by radical geographers and black political activists (see Jackson, 1987) for its narrow empiricism and the assumptions made about 'race' (i.e. that it was an essential category), which are now out of kilter with contemporary understandings of identity and 'difference'.
In the 1980s, influenced by understandings of 'race' as a social construction rather than a 'natural' difference, geographers sought to explain and challenge such patterns of inequality in cities as products of structural processes - in particular focusing on the role of the housing market in shaping urban space and producing racial segregation (e.g. Smith, 1987; Anderson, 1991). In the USA and to a lesser extent the UK attention also focused on the spatial concentration of the underclass...