Introduction.

A rapid evolution of interstitial and pluralistic identities has been a hallmark of 20^th century urbanism. From transnational diaspora to job-seeking immigrants, they are playing a critical role, instrumental in transforming urban space into metropolitan space, the city in the region to the global city. This change, however, has been accompanied by a unique set of alarming situations ranging from a gentrification of the inner city to an urban politics based on race and color and rising urban violence.

Moreover, the spatial implications of these changes are not yet adequately understood by design and planning disciplines. It is a matter of great concern that the elitist principles theorists and professionals have followed as a convention either do not work enough or do not work soon enough for these contemporary realities and requirements. Some of the contemporary themes, which exemplify the deep schism between the spatial discourses of these academic disciplines and the reality of their context, are the current invocations of:

• an "ecology of fear " in large metropolitan areas
  (Mike Davis, Ecology of fear: Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster)

• the "discontents" of the increasingly global marketplace
  (Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its discontents: essays on the new mobility of people and money)

• the urbanization of ‘injustice’ in the fast changing socio-economic realities of urban areas
  ( Michael Keith et al, The urbanization of Injustice )

This paper proposes that:

To understand this unique and historical nature of fin de millenaire urbanism and its seemingly veritable minefield of conflicts, we have to understand the process of production of urban space. We have to connect economy and culture and form a sophisticated vocabulary of urbanism that goes beyond simplistic definitions of identities and relations. Moreover, to fully understand this new globalized urban spatiality, we require a theoretical framework that provides a critical position from which to examine the process of this spatial change. Here the paper brings in the writings of French sociologist-philosopher Henri Lefebvre, in particular his book La Production de l’espace (1974, published in English as The Production of Space, 1991), which potentially offers such a theory of space.

Fig.1

Here the growing number of such interstitial groups, including a large number of poor first-generation immigrants from various parts of the world, has been coincident with a gradual physical decay and a rise in racial violence. (Fig.2 below shows nine riots in London with highest arrest totals and in fact these 3 areas lead the list) Meanwhile, these areas are slowly getting "embourgeoised " with young professionals moving in because of cheap property. The paper argues against the prevailing notion that the needs of these diverse groups are irreconcilably disparate and contends that we can find meaningful action and strategies from this milieu.

Fig.2

Fig.3 shows the city of London.

Fig. 3