The marketing of diversity in urban contexts results from two recent phenomena. First, the positive view taken of cosmopolitan and diverse urban environments (by city governments, by tourists, and by investors), and, second, the empowerment of minorities who put their religious, ethnic, and gendered expressions of (multiple) belonging on stage. In the following chapter, I give an overview of the concept of diversity in different scientific communities, starting from the first uses of the term 30 years ago in the United States. Recently, the German Sociological Association (GSA) organized its annual conference around the theme “Diversity and Cohesion: Challenges of a New Societal Complexity.”
Examples of the perceived (as growing) diversity of social expressions and forms of life include the increase in different religious communities; the flexibilization and differentiation of forms of work and occupation; the growing determination of people’s social conditions by diverse factors like communicative competence, networks, and experience; the continued differentiation of cultural orientations; the diverse development of lifestyles and sexual orientations; and the diffusion of new information and communication technologies. The initial question to be posed here is whether the situation is one of an empirically observable increase in these forms and patterns of diversity, or whether it is the case that (only) perceptions of them have changed. Further considerations are concerned with normative aspects of social cohesion. Is this promoted by increasing (perceptions of) diversity or can processes of the erosion of social cohesion be observed? At the same time it is postulated that the many forms of individual, collective, socially relevant diversity are always also socially created forms of diversity and that their relationship to cohesion is thus not fundamentally strained.