Urban designing in heterogeneous cities: issues and responses

The ways of life of a city's inhabitants are culturally differentiated by the income they have at their disposal and their taste of cultures. In an era of the increasing globalisation of the economy, most cities have significant minority populations and areas that are dominated by specific ethnic and/or socio-economic groups. Each such neighbourhood possesses a patina that gives it an identity and its inhabitants a ‘feeling of home’. The patina is formed by a myriad of unselfconscious design acts made by its inhabitants. Self-conscious urban design decisions made by municipal authorities can either reinforce or oppose such personalisation of the built environment. Much depends on the socio-physical vision that the power elite of a city have for the future for their city and its precincts. The policies that have been employed to achieve specific ends have shifted back and forth from promoting heterogeneity at the precinct level to local homogeneity creating diversity at the urban scale. How successful have they been? How does the society move ahead?