7. Urban Diversity and Inequality in Auckland

In this chapter, Terruhn discusses the relationships between urban policy and planning discourses of diversity and socio-spatial urban inequalities in the context of New Zealand’s largest and most diverse city, Auckland. Centrally, the chapter argues that in spite of aspirations to inclusiveness, discourses of diversity effectively reinforce and deflect from socio-spatial inequalities as a result of processes that are related to the marketisation of diversity in the context of global inter-urban competition. In conceiving of diversity primarily as an economic asset, policy discourses create a dichotomy between desirable and undesirable diversity, whilst spatial planning practices commodify diversity in a way that caters primarily to young, affluent consumers. Low-income residents are excluded from such visions and practices of diversity. At the same time, a preoccupation with shared values and social cohesion as the basis for convivial coexistence deflects from considerations of inequalities and how they affect social relations in diverse urban spaces.