Planning for Diversity

Policy and Planning in a World of Difference

Dory Reeves

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134447824
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Aménagement urbain et paysager

The practical importance of diversity and equality for spatial planning and sustainable development is still not widely understood. Using international examples, this book shows planners and educationalists the benefits of building in a consideration of diversity and equality at each stage and level of planning.Despite being one of the most diverse and gender balanced of the built environment professions, complacency has been widespread in planning. This book shows why a diverse profession is important and drawing on a wide range of good practice, shows how those involved in planning can develop their sensitivity to and expertise in diversity and equality.

CHAPTER 1
DIVERSITY, SUSTAINABILITY, SPACE AND PLACE

Planning for Diversity means constructing approaches to spatial planning, which address difference and equality of opportunity. Diversity needs to address difference as well as discrimination, social exclusion and environmental injustice. Since difference by itself cannot capture all inequalities, diversity becomes benign without a strong link to equality.

To progress we all have a huge amount of learning to do. We need to continuously update our understanding of what planning for diversity means for our communities and us; as citizens, politicians and professionals. Spatial planning needs to reflect the relationship between sustainable development, space and place, diversity and equality.

This chapter has three parts. Drawing on contemporary psychological and sociological literature, Part 1 introduces the interrelated concepts of diversity and equality as they relate to sustainability and the planning of spaces and places. It looks at the nature and politics of diversity and how we understand difference. It introduces some of the facets of difference which anyone engaged in planning and regeneration needs to be aware of. It considers how one difference becomes more important or significant than another. Part 2 introduces sustainability and, in particular, examines what the concept means for people as individuals. A sustainable community functions at an economic, environmental and social level and yet many reports, articles and debates on sustainability make no explicit reference to diversity and equality. Sustainable development is more than intergenerational equity in that, to work, it must not reproduce inequality or create the potential for discrimination. Part 3 looks at the nature of space and place, the building blocks of spatial planning and how these relate to sustainability.

PART 1 INTEGRATING EQUALITY AND DIVERSITY

Three examples from the USA, Ireland and the UK illustrate how agencies apply the concept of diversity in practice.

1. The Director of the New York planning department mapped out her vision for planning when she said that it works for an ‘inclusive city, with economic opportunities for everyone, a healthy environment and an improved quality of life in revitalized neighbourhoods’ (Burden, 2003).
2. The Equality Authority of Ireland has as its mission ‘Equality in a diverse Ireland’ (Equality Authority, 2003).
3. The UK disability group Royal Association for Disability and Rehabilitation (RADAR) launched a campaign in 2003 ‘for a world where human difference is anticipated, accommodated and celebrated’ RADAR (2003a) Mission. Online. Available HTTP: http://www.radar.Org.uk/RANE/Templates/frontpage.asp?1HeaderID=227 (accessed 30 Nov 2004).

The above statements all recognize the ways in which diversity and equality are intertwined. Equal opportunities and diversity are not mutually exclusive. Equality should be the normative value underpinning diversity, giving it teeth and meaning. Equality means ensuring that people with different needs have equality of opportunity and outcome. Diversity without equality addresses only difference. Diversity with equality also addresses power.

There is legislation in place in many countries to protect people from the worst excesses of discrimination although we live in societies where discrimination on racial, sexual, disability and age grounds still persists. Commentators on the EU have found that, although law is in place to ensure equality, full equality cannot be achieved until the traditional social stereotypes which are a feature of everyday life are broken down (Rosof, 1998).

Diversity is ‘a state or quality of being different or varied, a point of difference’. Across a large part of the world, people tend to use the term ‘difference’ to refer to the state of being unlike the majority and diversity as the quality of being different. Difference tends to need a reference point to make sense. So, for example, A is different from B, meaning that B is the reference point. Diversity does not imply a reference point. Wendy Davies, along with many equality experts, has explored the problems in taking a narrow view of diversity. She sees diversity dealing with and involving the management of differences. The confusion arises because some differences give rise to discrimination and disadvantage and some do not. Gender, race, disability and age are key issues at the root of much discrimination in UK society (Reeves, 2003b:24). Legislation provides some protection in the UK and by 2006 it will cover sexual orientation, religion and age, so organizations need to move towards examining issues and policies from a number of perspectives (EU, 2000a, b). Chapter 3 looks at this in more detail.

In the summer of 2002 Wendy Davies spent some time in South Africa where she met a number of black community leaders. After the elections, many white community leaders felt that the black and the white communities needed to get to know each other better. Needless to say many black leaders were wary. They felt they knew a lot about the white community; after all they had oppressed them for decades (Davies and Ohri, undated).

One of the characteristics of the relationship between a powerful and a less powerful group is that the norms and values of the powerful are well known to the less powerful. Their survival may even be dependant on that knowledge. However the powerful group do not have the same need to know a great deal about the less powerful. The idea of getting to know one another better and learning to appreciate and value differences needs to take account of, both the impact of the power imbalance, and the need to undo some of the damaging stereotypes and misconceptions that may have served to reinforce the power imbalance (Davies in Reeves, 2003b:24).

The values we as individuals attach to characteristics reflect power relationships. Far from being neutral, our value base including our professional value base can be gendered or racialized. Our institutions and structures often reflect this. It is not that we simply ascribe different qualities and characteristics to different groups; we attach values to the differences. At the heart of inequality lies an ideology of superiority—an ideology that has traditionally served to maintain the interests of the powerful. Power is at the heart of the distinction between diversity and equality. Equality addresses power; diversity addresses difference. Both need to be addressed. So we need a conception of diversity which embraces equality and discrimination. According to Gramsci’s (1971) doctrine of hegemony or power, the ascendancy of a group rests on their ability to translate their worldview into a pervasive and dominant ethos. It helps, although it is not critical, if the group is in the majority. The subordinate group then becomes quiescent, having come to believe that the dominant ethos is somehow pre-ordained or natural (Drake, 1999:16). Put another way, the ascendancy of a particular view of the world depends on the ability of a group or class to impose its views on everyone else. Drake used this concept to show how, when those in the disability movement developed a social understanding of disability, very different to the established medical model, more disabled people felt empowered to advocate their real desires.

The normative nature of equality is best reflected in Sweden where equality between women and men is a crucial part of the country’s welfare state model. This has as its starting point the view that society can progress in a democratic direction and become effective and open only when both women and men, de facto, influence the development of all spheres in society. The overall assumption (and the national goal agreed by the Parliament) is that women and men have the same rights, obligations and opportunities in all areas of life: to pursue work which provides economic independence; to care for children and the home; to participate in politics, unions and other societal activities; to share power and influence; to live a life free from gender-related violence (Astrom, 2003).

Equality between men and women was stressed in the Social Justice Report of 1994, the report which formed the basis of the British Labour Government’s political agenda following their 1997 election victory (The Commission on Social Justice, 1994). In contrast to Sweden, where equality became more enshrined in practice, in the UK, social inclusion became the more accepted political goal within which the equality dimension was subsumed. In 1997, the Labour Government in the UK set up the Social Exclusion Unit with a view to tackling people and areas experiencing linked problems such as unemployment, educational performance, poor skills, family breakdown, high crime rates, housing and health. Studies show poverty as highly gendered, racialized with a disability dimension (Lister, 1997, 2003; May, 1997; Bronstein, 1999; Brundtland, 2000). However, attempts to address the way in which these social problems also reflect discrimination have been patchy. The framing of social inclusion in terms of poverty and unemployment can make the underlying differences between groups of people invisible. Further studies show that issues are understood and experienced very differently by different groups as illustrated by Pain’s (2001) work on fear and crime in the city and Ruddick’s (1996) work on the construction of difference. Nonetheless, there are government programmes in the UK such as the Diversity Challenge which recognize that diversity and equal opportunities should be used together to make the idea of equality real (Equality Direct, 2002).

The concept of diversity originated in the USA in the 1970s in the field of management (Kanter, 1977) and during the 1990s it was adopted by many European organizations. There are still fundamental differences resulting from important cultural and historical roots which affect the way it plays out in practice. Simons (2002) observes that the USA has a more multi-cultural tradition whereas Europe is more mono-cultural and noted for putting pressure on incomers to assimilate and learn the language. In a series of speeches in 2002 and 2003, David Blunkett, Britain’s Home Secretary, stressed the importance of immigrants learning English and understanding what it means to be British. The USA/Canadian and New Zealand citizenship ceremonies which every new citizen takes have always marked an important and symbolic belonging to a country but there has never been such a formal requirement in Britain.

Problems occur when organizations think they are moving to diversity from an equal opportunity approach in the belief that discrimination no longer exists. What must be central to an integrated model of diversity which encompasses inequality is the concept of change and transformation of existing power relationships (Kirton and Greene, 2000). It is important that professionals value diversity, promote equality and become more conscious of the power relationships that exist within any group or community and take account of the ideological basis of that power difference. Diversity needs to address difference and inequality. One of the key problems is that within the arena of politics, academics such as Philips (1999) have argued that difference has actually displaced equality as the dominant concern of progressive politics and it has become a self-fulfilling prophesy. The responsiveness of liberal democracy, she argues, exerts pressures for political rather than economic equalization which means that it is proving easier to persuade people to act against a demonstrated political inequity than against an economic one.

Commentators such as Jackson (2003) believe that the equality agenda in the USA has been shaped by a felt need to right the wrongs of the past, to redistribute power and opportunity, and to develop unused potential particularly between black and white communities. The theme of Martin Luther King’s famous speech in 1963 which is remembered for the phrase ‘I have a dream’ contained a very strong message that governments had consistently broken their promises in delivering equality (Jackson, 2003). In the USA individuals and groups are more likely to work out diversity issues in court since the legislation provides a much sharper tool which can be accessed by groups rather than individuals. In Britain, the equality agenda has been shaped more by a commercial imperative brought about by the need to increase the effective labour force. Over the past 20 years, the USA and Europe have converged on diversity partly as a result of globalization and the need for corporations to understand crosscultural issues fully if they are to succeed in the global marketplace. Britain has possibly more similarities with the USA than other European countries.

The public sector case for equality and diversity is not only analogous to but also different from the business case outlined by Rutherford and Ollerearnshaw (2002). The business case encompasses issues of fairness in employment practices, having a good reputation, access to wider client and customer base and avoiding litigation as a consequence of discrimination. Unique to the public sector are issues of equality of access and representation. Although both the USA and the UK have much to learn from each other, experts in the corporate and business fields warn against the indiscriminate import and export of models and approaches (Simons, 2002:25). Governments at the national and local levels are bound by mutually agreed United Nations declarations such as The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

UNDERSTANDING DIVERSITY THROUGH PSYCHOLOGY— RACE AND SEX

As professionals and members of a community, it is important that we are as explicit as we can be about the identities we impose on others or assume for ourselves (Heikkila, 2001). In this way we should be able to identify potential sources of stereotyping, bias or discrimination using the tools outlined in Chapter 7. Differences between people reveal themselves in a variety of ways: physical, language or dialect, faith, beliefs and values. Once stereotyping sets in, it can be difficult to change (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 I’m not changing

Perceptions can be as important as reality. Often valued judgements result from ignorance or stereotyping (Milroy, 1999). We may perceive ourselves different to those around us and yet others may see us as very similar to them. We may see no difference between ourselves and those around us yet others may see us differently. Our sense of people around us is based on our personal and social identity. According to the theory of identity developed by Tajfel (1981) and Turner (1987, 1991) we categorize or put labels on people, we identify or associate ourselves with certain groups and we compare ‘our’ groups with other groups (Hogg, 1996). This tendency to categorize can be seen throughout the social and physical sciences.

Contemporary psychology shows that most people use ethnicity and sex rather than age or disability as the most significant ways of categorizing people and so these are the two principle ways by which we distinguish individuals (Myers, 2001). When asked to comment on who made a particular statement in a video-recorded interview, people (and they were sighted people in these experiments) often forgot who said what, but remembered the race of the person who made each statement (Hewstone, Hantzi and Johnston, 1991). When we talk about cities we say we live in diverse communities or more specifically we might say we live in culturally diverse cities. For instance, Toronto has the highest level of foreign-born population in Canada at 40 per cent, exceeding Miami, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles (Bourne, 2000). The Borough of Newham, London (UK), has the highest proportion of non-white ethnic groups in the UK at 61 per cent (Burbage, 2003). For all this, children do not seem to have the same awareness of racial difference. An anecdote helps illustrate this. On a BBC radio current affairs programme in 2001, the following story was told to illustrate how adults influence the way children start to see themselves. A parent tells of their young child coming home from school talking excitedly about their day; whom they played and talked with and what they did. The child mentions the name of their new friend and the mother pausing, asks if the child is black. ‘What’s black mum? I’ll need to ask him’, says the child.

Although sex and race are the most common identifiers, for sociologists and economists, paid work plays a key role in defining an individual’s position in society. Access to and the nature of employment helps determine an individual’s socioeconomic status or class, and a person’s ability to access employment is first and foremost determined by their access to education. Lack of paid work then leads to poverty and social exclusion. Comparing different sectoral groups, the majority of disabled p...