Innumerable Types of Diversity: The Potential of Latent Urbanity

Diversity as a category of urban studies provides a path of analysis that contributes to understanding contemporary milieus either as concrete urban realities or potential realms of sustainable ‘everyday-lifeness’ (LEFEBVRE, 1970). To do so, it must build upon the concept of urban diversity as theoretical apparatus to recognize the latent potential of the ‘urban’. To explore such potentiality the methodological focus needs to move to the concept of urban as addressed in the new debate on the urban question that explores the planetary dimension of the urban beyond the ontological divides (BRENNER, 2014). My thesis is that in order to reveal the urban potential a three-sided cognitive synergy is needed that implies the consideration of: (1) urbanity as a project, (2) diversity as the essence of urbanity once reconnected to the urban, (3) transactional rationality as a strategy to embody diversity in the spatial interweaving of communication, interaction and co-production of multifaceted ways of inhabiting the contemporary urban ecosystem as a whole (BRIDGE, 2005).