Feb 28, 2017 | News
The Toronto City Book brings together four years of in-depth research undertaken in the Jane and Finch district in the northwest of Toronto as part of the EU funded DIVERCITIES project. As the Team Leader for the book my role was to oversee the research and content. Toronto, unlike many of its European counterparts, takes a positive approach to diversity, as reflected in its official slogan: Diversity our Strength. Nonetheless, Toronto’s approach has also been criticized for utilizing diversity as a marketable asset (Boudreau et al., 2009) or for ignoring unemployment, poverty and the issue of socio-spatial inequality. The district has a population of approximately 80,000 residents, making Jane and Finch truly hyper-diverse with regard to many indicators including ethnic and cultural background, place of origin, legal status, income, age, educational level, housing and the built environment. The Toronto City Book can be downloaded as a PDF from the DIVERCITIES website.
Nov 1, 2016 | News
Meaningful Encounters is an exploratory research project attempting to understand the relationship between meaningful encounters in public spaces and place making activities in the city. Together with Sara Ozogul, I organised an event at Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam on 25 October 2016 titled The City as a Lab #2: Creating Meaningful Encounters in Cities of Diversity. We had several questions: When do encounters become meaningful? When do they bring diverse people together and provide new ways of relating beyond presumptions and stereotypes? And can we plan for those encounters? We held a ‘mobile urban lab experiment’ in Amsterdam Oost with a small group of participants from different disciplinary and professional backgrounds. During an organised walk they explored different spaces and initiatives in order to gain insight into the practices, challenges and opportunities of creating meaningful encounters. You can read a report on the DIVERCITIES website.
Oct 12, 2016 | News
“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”*: giving voice to planning practitioners is the title of an article published in the Planning Theory & Practice Journal. The abstract is below and you can read the full article at Taylor & Francis Online.
Planning schools follow a more or less similar path in educating young practitioners as true guardians of “public interest.” Although planning theory and education define certain ideal roles for planners along this path (e.g. provider of equal access to urban services, distributor of rights to the city, facilitator, negotiator, reflective practitioner, mediator, decision-maker), the actual role of the practicing planner is shaped by the changing contemporary conditions of political economy. We often describe these as neoliberalism, market-led urban development, opportunism, entrepreneurialism, consumerism, financialization, and so on. The rules of the game in the city are defined by these forces, which influence not only the main field of action in planning, but also the experiences of planners in practice. While planning students are taught to be the guardians of the public interest, in the face of the power relations that are shaped by these dynamics, planners usually lack the power to fulfill that role, which surely frustrates them (Forester, 1982 Forester, J. (1982). Planning in the face of power. Journal of the American Planning Association , 48 , 67–80. 10.1080/01944368208976167 [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]).
* Muhammad Ali (world heavyweight boxing champion).
Dec 1, 2015 | News
The Advantages of Diversity is a paper I presented at the Nordregio Forum in Helsingor in 2015 on the topic of how to turn diversity into advantages. It considered how diversity itself is not an easy concept to grasp, as there are new forms of diversity emerging due to population mobility and increasing heterogeneity of migration in terms of country of origin, ethnic groups, legal status and so on. In my presentation I mentioned how challenging it is to design policies addressing these different groups suggesting that policies not only meet the needs of diverse people, but also increase or maintain the competitive advantage of cities. European urban diversity policies are people-based but have shifted towards a neo-assimilationist direction in recent years, meaning that social and cultural aspects of integration dominates policy-making tendencies. Ethnic diversity is highlighted as an economic asset in the policy discourses of some cities (e.g. London), but an ethnicity and race-based approach fails to address the needs and capacities of a complex urban society nowadays. Grouping people into broad categories leads to integration and social-mix policies, which despite good intentions, fail in reality. For more information read the short interview I did titled How can Nordic cities profit from the diversity of their population?
May 31, 2012 | Teaching
As part of the Urban Geography: Urbanization and Cities of the Advanced Economies course at Utrecht University, Roosevelt Academy, I created a blog to engage with students. The course focused on the diverse urbanization dynamics and periods characterized by significant social and spatial change. Students were expected to conduct comparative case studies using team blogs so that we could all follow their progress online! Find out what happened throughout the course here.