University of Toronto Press has recently published Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York and Los Angeles, by Mohammad Abdul Qadeer, who teaches at Queen's in Kingston. He has some ground rules:
Cities that do not promote civil rights to diversity are not multicultural even if people of different cultural origins live there....They are multi-ethnic without being multicultural.Multiculturalism, he posits, "is the combination of cultural diversity with a common ground of values and institutions." You need confident, assertive minority communities, not just (potentially marginal) immigrants and expats. Qadeer argues that to be a contender for multicultural status, a city needs to exist within a strong democracy, with strong guarantees of civil rights, and a resulting culture of (at least) tolerance and accommodation. Cities have always attracted diverse minorities. They have rarely been multicultural.
And multiculturalism is a set of political/societal choices, not just a byproduct of mobility or prosperity.
Published in March. I haven't found much in the way of reviews yet.
