Cities are dirty. They are vibrant. They’re messy. They’re rich, they’re drab, they’re unequal. They’re gentrifying, they’re good for you, they’re bad for you. They are where problems arise. They are where solutions are found. They are unsafe, scary, they’ve changed beyond recognition. They are full of life, exciting, welcoming. They are multicultural, pretty much always. And to different eyes and different dispositions their multiculturalism takes on one or more of these faces (dirty, vibrant, messy…).

This web-book is a collaborative attempt to make sense of these conflicting images and to try to understand what’s been happening to the “multicultural city”. Hailed by some as the promised land of inter-communal and inter-personal harmony and decried by others as a hellscape of social disintegration and loss of identity, the multicultural city defies expectations on both sides and simply exists. In Europe, it does so in the context of an increasingly virulent (and increasingly mainstream) nativism and often those who govern it have to contend with shrinking budgets and austerity’s demands. In this context, different cities go about “being multicultural” differently. It is to those differences and similarities that we – Licia Cianetti (political scientist, based in London), Alexandre Francisco “Diaphra” aka Biru (artist, based in Lisbon), Galas Mbengue (artist, based in Turin), Farwa Moledina (artist, based in Birmingham), and Andrejs Strokins (artist, based in Riga) – tend our ears and eyes in this project.

We consider four actually existing multicultural cities at the four corners of Europe (Birmingham, Lisbon, Riga and Turin) and, in each of the chapters that follow, ask what “multiculturalism” looks like in practice in those different contexts (Chapter 1), what role the Great Recession and austerity play in these multicultural stories (Chapter 2), and what the new Covid-19 pandemic crisis means on top of the crisis we thought we were observing (Chapter 3).

The collaborative nature of this project – across disciplines, countries, and identities – is a way to try to overcome (at least partially) the biases, misconceptions, and misperceptions that the lone researcher invariably carries. It is a way of going beyond the strictures of a single viewpoint, to build a collective storytelling that is more attuned to the complexities and contradictions of the multicultural city.

Part artist commission, part conversation, this web-book was developed over three years (2019–2021) through a series of online and offline exchanges between the researcher and the artists. It takes the form of a multimedia (video, audio, text, image) collection of reflections by the five authors. Its current, final form is not meant as the end of this conversation, and it invites others to offer comments, critiques and proposals to keep this reflection going (send them to l.cianetti@bham.ac.uk).

See the About the Project section to know more about the research project this web-book is a part of.

The cities in this book are different. Located at the four corners of Europe, their architecture, their histories, their weather, the way they “look and feel”, all seem to point to their incomparability. Yet all of them tell stories of lived difference, of urban dreams and nightmares, of coming together and living separate lives, of mixing, conflict, harmony, violence, change.

Birmingham is shaped by an industrial and colonial past and a present that is “super-diverse” and in constant “regeneration”; its reality, squeezed into insistent headlines about Trojan Horses and “Muslims versus gays” rows, always defying easy generalisations. In Riga the relevant Other is different, but also comprises about half of the city’s inhabitants. These are the “Russian speakers”, their presence stubbornly reminding Latvia not only of its 50 years in the Soviet Union, but also of its capital city’s longer history as a multicultural, multilingual hub. Lisbon wears its past as capital of the Portuguese empire in equal parts solemnly and lightly. However, a new generation of Afrodescendants (that’s how the Portuguese Other is usually named) is increasingly challenging the myth of Portugal’s colonialismo brando and bringing deep-seated issues of racism, segregation, police violence and discrimination out into the open. Finally, in Turin the fiction of Italy as new to immigration is increasingly showing its thread. Its long history of labour immigration – from the countryside, from Southern Italy, and from abroad – and of its stratified exclusions, leaves its mark everywhere in the city, and here too an industrial past and migration shape the city’s character. Through the complexities of this past, the “second generations” are making their claim for their non-white Italianness as a present “us” rather than an obscure Other.

Look at them with different eyes, and you’ll see different cities. Are they multicultural havens, full of life and creativity? Are they alien spaces, divided, unsafe, and unrecognisable by the “natives”? Are these dreams? Are these nightmares?

Russian, Polish and Latvian cultures are part of my identity. My first language was Russian, so the Russian cultural space came first, then ‒ Polish and only later, at school, the Latvian one. I freely navigate all three of them. Politics is different. This is where I get confused, because politically I cannot find myself in any of them. And then confusion ensues. It is good to be aware of your roots, but you must never absolutize them as a political tool, like it happens in Latvia. I discuss these things with everyone, and there is pain everywhere, but I think that the time for pain is gone. And yet there are so many issues that are still burning.

In colloquial speech, things that are strange and inexplicable are described by the expression “Nye riba, nye myaso” (from Russian, meaning “neither fish, nor meat”). This expression conveys the concept of hybridity. What is interesting are the cacophonies of meanings, because it is amid complexity that our hearing is free to pick up screams or whispers in different voices, including the voice of the past. Layers of the past and the present are easy to observe in the urban environment. For example, when one returns to a part of a city after an absence of a few months, it’s possible to encounter it in an entirely different guise – shops and salons may have opened and closed, advertising signs are in ceaseless movement. In the nineties, such changes were particularly visible. The Soviet past was gradually “closed” and the once-stolen and forbidden past of the Latvian state “opened”. Suddenly finding themselves behind a topographic looking glass, city dwellers became confused, lost their way and went astray. They were afflicted by urban schizophrenia. Today, the imprints of past generations on now-cancelled maps are among the only remnants of the chaos of those times, along with some old video material (by my father, from 1992) and a conversation between a father and a son on the background of the changing city.

Every Saturday Konan Jones Brice meets fellow musicians in Porta Palazzo, Turin’s most important market and “multicultural hub”. Their music has been Porta Palazzo’s soundtrack for decades, and Jones and his colleagues have been witnesses to Turin’s changing fortunes from the ‘80s through to today. The songs in the video are “Trini” (Kholeho Mosala) and “Faggiasole” (Jones Konan), both from the album The Porta Palazzo Ministry.

The vocabulary of austerity is made of budget cuts, efficiencies, sacrifices, structural reforms, fiscal adjustments, and for some countries bailouts, Troika, memorandums of understanding. Its tangible matter is made of longer queues at job centres, more people sleeping rough, more food banks, emptier streets and boarded up buildings when people leave and places shrink, signs of neglect and solidarity, of resignation and protest.

Different countries had different experiences of it, different words to name it, different culprits to blame, different visible marks on the ground. And even within the same country different stories about austerity have been told. Depending on who you ask, for example, Latvia is either the proof that austerity works or the proof that austerity’s ‘success stories’ hide huge human and social costs. And yet through all the differences there are regularities: the unfortunately obvious fact that not all people are affected equally by cuts and that those who are already marginalised and excluded are hit the hardest – in Latvia, in Portugal, in Italy and in the UK. It is at the margins, therefore, that this story unfolds.

The two songs featured in this video are by Aboli, an Ivorian artist who recently passed away and who had for many years played with Jones, one of the symbols of Turin’s reggae. The songs are “Zion chant” and “Enfants du ghetto”.

Riga Central Market and its outskirts.

In my 10 years in Birmingham I have witnessed a rise in homelessness. It is truly heart-breaking and it is upsetting yet unsurprising that we are becoming desensitised to seeing people out on the streets. In one of the images, a man sits by a tree outside a Sainbury’s whilst people go about their daily commute, everyone lost in their own thoughts and worries; a woman walks past whilst on the phone, a plastic cup rolls away in the wind. It is a bleak sight. Pop up food banks and soup kitchens stationed outside closed shop fronts in town is the new normal, and is shown in a different image. Austerity is also affecting communities in other ways – cuts to school meals means children go hungry, and cuts to local refuse and the council’s budget causes unsafe footpaths for pedestrians. A broken fence is shown in a third image, this is a footpath I use daily, it sits just outside my local train station and is used by both the elderly and the very young, it has been this way for months.

When we started this web-book we wanted to look at what has been happening to “multicultural cities” after the 2008 financial crisis and the seemingly never-ending crisis/austerity mode that followed it. What did that permanent crisis look and feel like? What did it look and feel like in our cities and for people who are considered “diverse” or “marginal”? And then Covid-19 came. Cities are once again at the centre of it: more people, more concentrated, more normal places (public transport, pubs, places of worship, shops…) that become dangerous, more ways we used to share the same spaces with strangers that are now daunting or (intermittently) forbidden. There is already talk that cities will never be the same after this crisis: that there might be even more surveillance, that people who can afford it will want to live somewhere else, or (on a more positive note) that the grassroots solidarity networks that are springing up everywhere will become the basis for more people to ask for more and better government. We cannot know this now, but we need to ask: what is this crisis?

In a crisis – especially one of this magnitude, a health crisis that struck seemingly out of the blue (although human-made environmental destruction created the conditions for it) – we are often told, or tell each other, that we are all in the same boat. It doesn’t take much to see that this metaphor doesn’t work: the virus does not discriminate, but society does and so the virus and its economic effects hit harder where society hits harder. The pre-existing health conditions that make the virus more deadly, the likelihood that someone has to work a job that exposes them more to the risk of catching the virus, the pre-existing financial conditions of security or precariousness – they are not distributed evenly: we might be in the same storm, but we are sailing through it in very different boats (even this metaphor doesn’t quite work; we’re not sailing independently, and the storm and how it affects each of us differently also depend on how we sail). This is why it is important to look at this crisis in its broader context; a part of something longer, and deeper, and messier. When we call something a crisis, we implicitly invoke a time before and a time after the crisis, which is where “normal life” happens. But there are a lot of dislocations, disfunctions and inequalities hidden in that “normal”. Whose vulnerability, precarity and suffering where we considering “normal” before the crisis hit? And whose vulnerability, precarity and suffering will we – if we are not careful – return to consider “normal” after the crisis is over? Whose crisis counts? The contributions below show a glimpse of how this current crisis can be looked at in these broader terms: not a bolt from the sky that disrupts untroubled normality, but a new crisis nested inside myriad other crises that we called “normal”.

In our third and last contribution, to describe the current situation and the remarkable historical period we’re living through, Jones and I decided to talk straight through music. This seemed to us the best way to convey our state of mind and our thinking about the current situation. We decided to continue our story with a tribute to an Ivorian artist who’s been the symbol of the city’s reggae scene in the ‘90s: Abel a.k.a. Ras Akadje, singer in the historical Turin band “Sun Power”. In this piece Abel talks of the condition of “Babylon”, which is not the West, as it is often understood, but an intolerant and selfish way of thinking that leads to human conflict – anywhere in the world. Abel sings “War inna Babylon, war in Ethiopia / War inna Babylon, war in South Africa” – as a hymn to peace and non-violence. We dedicate this video to him and to all the other “warriors for peace” who are not among us any more.

Giorgio Masieri (drums), Jones Konan Brice (bass guitar), Paolo Festa (keyboards), Andrea Calia (guitar), Anta Mbengue (choirs), Galas Mbengue (voice).

LICIA CIANETTI is Lecturer in Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (2018-2022).

ALEXANDRE FRANCISCO “DIAPHRA” (aka Biru) is a musician, MC and multimedia artist based in Lisbon.

GALAS MBENGUE is a singer of Italian-Senegalese descent.

FARWA MOLEDINA grew up in Dubai, U.A.E, and now lives in Birmingham U.K.

ANDREJS STROKINS (b. 1984) is a Latvian photographer, living and working in Riga.

“What Happened to the multicultural city? Effects of nativism and austerity” is a three-year research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust (Early Career Fellowship no. ECF-2018-294; 2018–2021) and led by Licia Cianetti at Royal Holloway, University of London. It investigates how four European cities that have nominally embraced the “multicultural” label govern their multiculturalism in practice, under the double pressure of nativism and austerity. The aim is to understand what factors determine different responses to those pressures, and – ultimately – what the future of European “multicultural cities” is likely to be.

This project uses an innovative multimethod approach that combines process-tracing, policy analysis, discourse analysis, and ethnography-inspired collaborations with local artists. The latter “ethnographic dialogues” are structured as a combination of online commissions and offline artist–academic encounters and public events. For the online commissions, the four collaborating artists are asked to respond to (and also challenge) the researcher’s reflections on multiculturalism, austerity and nativism, by using their own artistic practice and experiences of their city. This exchange is also brought offline, as the researcher’s fieldwork visits to the four cities are occasions for the artists to lead the conversation on the lived experience of their city’s “multiculturalism” and to build alternative maps of their city in the process. The artist–academic exchange is also broadened to a wider public, with public events taking place in each of the four cities and, as a final event, in London.

This web-book is one of the planned outputs of this research project, weaving together the online commissions and our shared reflections in a multimedia narrative of lived urban multiculturalism.

Related publications

Cianetti, L. 2019. Governing the multicultural city: Europe’s ‘great urban expectations’ facing austerity and resurgent nativism. Urban Studies https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098019884214