Urban Regeneration And Cultural Diversity: An Assessement Of European Best Practices

Cultural diversity is one of the main challenges of our globalised world. Contemporary cities face increasing flows of migrants settling in new countries moved by economic and at times political reasons. This creates competitions for jobs and services. Diversity in beliefs and traditions can cause cultural conflicts and may end up in various forms of segregations of immigrants' communities. The hosting communities have been forced to develop new systems of governance to deal with conflicts and prejudice. Cities are the place of encounter of different ethnicities, where at times conflicts can become striking and destabilizing. New forms of citizenship need to be developed, where different identities can tolerate each other and grow side by side. Some politicians (see Cameron, UK) have publicly stated the failure of the multicultural model. But such statement might be analyzed, debated and maybe contested. Migration has a positive impact on economic growth, and potentially on cultural growth. Developing an appropriate valuation frameworks is therefore paramount. To this extent is important to identify good and best practices of diversity policies that might shed a light on how to progress on the basis of the lessons learned. The paper presents a review of European good and best practices of urban policies aiming to prevent and contrast discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation and physical disabilities in European Regions. A framework of valuation is then presented. The study was funded by the Italian Ministry of Equal Opportunities.