Plural cities in comparative perspective

Adopting a comparative perspective, the article focuses on ethnically heterogeneous cities as sites shaped by political economy, and asks whether varieties of the plural city can be mapped against varieties of polity. Four ideotypical configurations of city, society and polity (preindustrial-patrimonial, colonial, modern-industrial-capitalist, neoliberal-postmodern-global) are discussed in terms of their modalities of ethnicity. In preindustrial-patrimonial cities, rulers were concerned less with the ethnicity of subordinate minority populations than their ability to render tribute, taxes and labour. The colonial city was grounded in the differentiation of the population in terms of supposed 'racial' distinctions. Modern-industrial-capitalist cities sought the cultural and linguistic homogeneity of their immigrant populations through assimilation, or, where certain groups ('races') were thought unassimilable, through exclusion. In the late twentieth century such cities have shifted towards postindustrial and postmodern forms of sociality in a globalized, transnational, world espousing neoliberal economic and social policies and contested forms of 'multiculturalism'.