Implosive Multiculturalism: Staging of the Community in Bankstown, Sydney

Drawing on interviews with 30 residents, users, and traders in Bankstown’s town center, this article examines how built form facilitates a certain staging of the community, underpinning simulated encounters with the other. The article describes how the interviewees celebrate “differences” and “diversity” in their community, even as they reveal a certain indifference; signs of “difference” are substituted for genuine, reciprocal exchanges with the other, to the extent that the latter primarily appears in simulated form. Drawing on Baudrillard’s concept of implosion, different ways in which otherness is simulated are discussed, ranging from programmed “cultural events” to staging of the other-as-victim.