Social Diversity in Planning Practice

This sub-cluster focuses on the ways in which social complexity and diversity have been treated by development interventions and institutions, and includes critiques of efforts to institutionalise responses to multiple social identities. A number of problematic are examined, including:

The extent to which methodologies used by development institutions manage tensions between individual rights and needs (relating to the overlapping and at times contradictory identities of individuals), and group inequalities (relating to the existence of systematic inequalities related to particular aspects of identity, and to group affiliations); The ways in which organisational structures and policies focused on particular aspects of social identity (eg gender, disability, youth) attempt, or fail, to negotiate the intersectionality of social identity;

This sub-cluster links DPU research initiatives which attempt to understand how many of the institutional weaknesses and policy failures in addressing diversity lead to fragmentation, division, and violence on the basis of identity.

It also explores and critiques the policy and planning responses that are being proposed to address social divisions and identity based violence in cities, encompassing both efforts to avoid identity based conflict in cities, and efforts to promote equality, recognition and social integration in post conflict cities.