Cultural diversity and difference is increasing in European cities, driven by economic integration, migration and EU enlargement, but against a background of cultural friction. This book is concerned with how governance approaches to urban management and grass roots community dialogue can foster a sense of citizenship.

Cities divided by ethnic and cultural conflict need to identify, create and maintain some kind of shared identity amongst their inhabitants, if they wish to survive in competition with one another and not be submerged in tensions. Urban planning and city management can take these identities on board constructively and can assist them without allowing the city to deteriorate into a disconnected and hostile conglomeration. Belfast and Berlin are currently in the process of responding to this challenge: What will the implications be for town planners and how do they approach their task?

Urban Planning and Cultural Identity reviews the intense spatiality of conflict over identity construction in three cities where culture and place identity are not just post-modernist playthings but touch on the raw sensibilities of who people define themselves to be. Berlin as the reborn German capital has put 'coming to terms with' the Holocaust and the memory of the GDR full square at the centre of urban planning. Detroit raises questions about the impotence and complicity of planners in the face of the most extreme metropolitan spatial apartheid in the United States and where...

Urban Planning and Cultural Identity reviews the intense spatiality of conflict over identity construction in three cities where culture and place identity are not just post-modernist playthings but touch on the raw sensibilities of who people define themselves to be. Berlin as the reborn German capital has put 'coming to terms with' the Holocaust and the memory of the GDR full square at the centre of urban planning. Detroit raises questions about the impotence and complicity of planners in the face of the most extreme metropolitan spatial apartheid in the United States and where...