Cosmopolitan pain
Conflicts and tensions arising from diversity can be resolved by ‘competent urbanites’ – city dwellers who are resilient and capable of coexisting with each other.
GLOBALISATION has made our cities more diverse, and cities are in fact already a place of conglomeration of strangers and people from all over. Major cities around the world today have more foreignborn residents than before, with some cities having a population that is close to 40% foreign.
According to a report by the World Economic Forum, the annual migration growth from 2000 to 2015 was 2.4%, double the annual population growth of 1.2%. Some of the migrants moved to start new jobs, some were fleeing conflict and political instability – almost all of them ended up in cities.
In addition to the influx of new urban migration, some cities already have a long history of diversity and multiculturalism – like Kuala Lumpur, for instance.
From a sleepy and somewhat reluctant capital, KL has become a thriving postmodern city, with colliding cultures and identities from past history and current global flows. This, according to BritishPakistani scholar Ziauddin Sardar, has created a space full of contestation – politically, economically, and culturally – while at the same time, the city’s inhabitants are grappling with and seeking a unified identity.
Diverse benefits
Diversity is, of course, good for cities. Studies have shown that it is good for the economy, as cultural diversity has a positive effect on productivity. Also, foreigners with their different experiences, skills and abilities can add valuable elements to the existing way work and tasks are done, offering new ways of problem-solving.
Diversity also helps to create a more vibrant city, where the vast and diverse pool of human capital can be seen as “an enormous ecosystem where the traits of one type of being are complementary to and symbiotic with those of another”, as American urban theorist Richard Florida puts it. But managing coexistence within a diverse community is a different story altogether.
How do you manage a diverse city? On the national level, the Malaysian government has made an effort to promote social cohesion among the country’s communities. The Rukun Tetangga, or neighbourhood watch, was established in the aftermath of the 1969 racial riots to promote social cohesion and assist in community development. Setting up the Department of National Unity under the Prime Minister’s Office was also part of the effort.
However, these top-down efforts have not necessarily resulted in the intended outcomes. Backlash to recent attempts by the Pakatan Harapan government to, for instance, ratify the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination proves that there is still tension between different ethnicities in the country. Reacting to the backlash, Pakatan withdrew from ratifying the convention.
Top-down policies are obviously inadequate in managing coexistence among diverse communities. They are also less effective in promoting social resilience among citizens faced with tensions and frictions.
The ability for different communities to coexist requires more than policies and regulations. It requires a more engaged public.
Social resilience, likewise, needs to be built and developed from the ground up. Strangers need to feel confident about coexisting with each other in their everyday lives without relying on state management – even more so when the state itself is not interested in or committed towards enabling such coexistence.
It is then important, and useful, to pay attention to community-level spaces and bottom-up practices that can nurture coexistence and social resilience among diverse communities.
The competent urbanite
Sociologist Richard Sennett put forward the idea of the “competent urbanite”: urban inhabitants who are capable of orienting themselves in an ambiguous and complex urban environment – city dwellers who can adapt to changes and new challenges of life in the city.
These competent urbanites are not the kinds of inhabitants that rely on prescriptive ways of dealing with daily issues. Instead of relying on specific instructions or regulations, they are capable of making their own judgements when an issue arises.
To be a competent urbanite able to coexist with different people, one has to acquire certain skills. These include the ability to cooperate and coordinate with others, being respectful and convivial with others while still maintaining distance, and being able to divert tension whenever a problem arises.
A community consisting of competent urbanites would become resilient. But these skills do not come at birth. They need to be learned, nurtured and practised.
One way to develop these skills is to constantly open one’s self to informal social encounters and interactions. Through unmediated encounters, we are forced to negotiate our own boundaries, to be more engaged with our activities and surroundings, to assert our own presence without overstepping others.
This will produce competent urbanites with the skills and experience that will give them the confidence and capability to coexist with others, thus creating a resilient community, adaptable and able to face urban challenges.
These encounters, theoretically, can happen anywhere – streets, schools, markets, parks, and any other public space. But in Malaysia, we don’t go to the same schools, live in the same neighbourhood, pray at the same houses of worship, spend time in the same parks, or read the same newspapers and portals.
While Covid-19 may be easing in Malaysia, we are driven more apart and isolated than ever from one another. However, the pandemic also gives us a rare opportunity to reset.
We can reset how we run our schools, develop housing estates and townships, create our workspaces, build our markets and, ultimately, how we conduct our public lives. We need to create a new public life that produces city inhabitants that are competent to coexist among diverse groups of people.
Managing coexistence and developing social resilience within a diverse community is no easy task.
Design theorists Horst WJ Rittel and Melvin M. Webber coined the term “wicked problems” to refer to social problems that are difficult to define and inherently unsolvable.
Different from problems in the natural sciences, which are definable and may have solutions that are findable, “wicked problems” are always ill-defined and are never solved. At best they are resolved, over and over again. Coexistence and diversity are such problems.
Even if we are able to create a new public life, strangers and people from different backgrounds are not going to magically embrace each other. Fears and prejudices will not immediately disappear every time strangers interact with one another.
Nevertheless, conflicts and tensions that arise from diversity can be resolved by urban inhabitants who are resilient and capable of coexisting with each other, and we can create these urbanites in our cities.
Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.
Jacqueline Woodson
Badrul Hisham Ismail is the director of programmes at Iman Research.