This book addresses questions of pluralism in a time of increasing ethnic, religious and cultural diversity in the public and private spaces of our cities. It analyses different types of regulation — property rights, municipal ordinances and urban planning — and their role in protecting and supporting diversity.
Pluralism – and the connected questions of toleration – is today a crucial theoretical and practical problem in need of critical discussion. Differently from what is usually done, such discussion must take urban space into serious consideration, not only because many of the issues of pluralism that we deal with daily are most forcefully manifest in cities, but also because the articulation of space has a close connection with the conflicts generated by diversity. Against this background, the book analyses the complex relation between pluralism (understood as the coexistence of many diverse conceptions of the good) and different types of public and private space (streets, parks, public squares, restaurants, shopping malls, homeowners associations and so on), with a specific focus on the rules that govern such spaces. Accordingly, it deals with toleration as a matter of public ethics: that is, how and why the state should act in relation to particular problems. Indeed, the purpose of the book is to identify the limits within which acceptable public measures to spatially regulate diversity may lie. It does so by adopting a framework in which pluralism is seen as a pivotal value of contemporary democracies that must be protected and supported.
Francesco Chiodelli is Associate Professor of Urban and Legal Geography at the University of Turin.
Stefano Moroni is Professor in Planning at Milan Polytechnic University.
Author/Editor details at time of book publication.