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Differential inclusion, encounters, migration, Singapore, urban diversity
Abstract:
This paper interrogates processes of everyday urban diversification by challenging dominantnarratives of ‘‘diversity’’ and ‘‘integration’’. I address the management aspects of urbandiversification through the normative and productive categorisations of race, citizenship andcivility in shared spaces to highlight the forms of differential inclusion of newcomers, drawingupon ethnographic data from Jurong West in Singapore, to explain subjective inclusion throughstate-led measures and everyday forms of coexistence. There are two key aspects of differentialinclusion discussed here: a) the explicit rules that form the basis of differential state treatment of itspopulation by race, ethnicity and citizenship status and b) the implicit principles in which migrantsare included according to normative forms of appropriate behaviour in public spaces.Consequently, social norms and civility become tools of inclusion, and, relationally, exclusion,producing a politicised logic of managing diversity both in structural and everyday spaces.Recognising the profound ways in which differential inclusion shapes space through its subtle yetpervasive ways not only imparts analytical purchase to the study of everyday interactions but alsografts the meaning of belonging and difference onto the ever-changing contours of diversification inthe city.
