Managing cultural diversity and (re)defining the national in ‘global South’ cities

This themed section explores the formation, representation and management of cultural diversity in cities of the ‘global South’ and how these processes are implicated in redefinitions of the nation and national identity. By exploring the linkages between cultural diversity, the city and the nation, the contributions provide important insights into the major challenges facing non-western cities, including those with explicit ‘global city’ aspirations. The introduction reflects critically on the ways in which the connections between diversity and cities are conventionally understood and imagined in scholarship in western urban scholarship and the limits of such approaches to thinking about diversity politics in cities in other parts of the world. Reiterating recent calls to revisit the relationship between the city and the nation state, we argue that it is by attending to the entanglement of global, national and local scales that we are able to make better sense of the ways in which the languages of diversity operate in and across different non-western cities.