Cultural Pluralism in Cities of the Global South

This conference focuses on cities that are emerging (or striving to emerge) as regional centres of power in the Global South, on capital cities and major urban centres in Asian, African, and Latin American countries at different stages of the nation building process. The conference asks what terms like “urban,” “diversity,” and “cultural pluralism,” actually mean in these contexts. It does so by adopting a critical approach that questions official discourse, documents and policy programmes and compares them to how relevant stakeholders understand the ‘city’, the ‘nation’, and ‘the global’. It wants to unpack the power relations within the city and the ways in which the city projects itself beyond the national scale and positions itself both at a wider regional level and within global cultural hierarchies.