Despite growing multicultural make up of the urban societies in last several decades, urban theorist has paid less attention towards planning for multiculturalism than planning for diversity. Although diversity/pluralism is used interchangeably with multiculturalism, they are based on two separate ideals as diversity generally refers to class, race, ethnicity and socio-economic variables contrast to multicultural ideology relating to specific communities containing multiple ethnicities and cultures. As debated in liberal political and contemporary urban theories, the challenges of spatial urban planning in multicultural situation emanates from the politics of difference in the constitution and sharing of public space both at national and local levels of co-existence among different cultural groups, their different cultural values and practices. At the level of multicultural residential context, the significance of public space has been emphasized for its role in social interactions leading to social and civic solidarity to deal with politics of cultural difference. Such emphasis, among others, includes but not limited to the understanding of particular social relation resulting from the relationship between human and his physical environment in a multicultural context. This paper uses the concept of ‘sense of place’ to describe the particular social atmosphere resulting from the use of public spaces and social relation between different cultural groups in a multicultural residential environment to understand the politics of living with difference. It aims to identify the sense of place from the perspective of residents, which is expressed through a number of factors related to behavior and attitude in a residential environment of a traditional neighborhood, Yetkha-baha, in the traditional city core of the Kathmandu city, capital of Nepal. Results are based on ethnographic analysis of sixteen in-depth interviews of residents and on site observation of the use and appropriation of neighborhood square.
Multiculturalism, residential environment, sense of place
