Managing Diversity?

MANAGING OF DIVERSITY? looks at the role, potential and limits of arts and culture when it comes to helping us understand the diversity of the societies we are living in. By this we mean the diversity in our cities (new communities) as well as the diversity in Europe due to the enlarging EU. Are cultural organisations and institutions meeting up to the expectations and challenges posed by cultural diversity in Europe today? In our view, diversity cannot be 'managed', but it needs a new kind of creative management to empower organisations to deal with cultural diversity and to change accordingly. And why should cultural organisations need or want to change? In his essay Gottfried Wagner reasons: 'Given the drastically changing urban societal composition in the 'old' Europe, paired with the 'culturalisation' of conflicts, it is amazing how slow cultural institutions are to adapt and with which degree of reluctance they deal with the issue.'