GANDLER, Stefan. City and identity. Estud. pesqui. psicol. []. 2007, 7, 2. ISSN 1808-4281.

In urban life, the problem of difference and identity receives a special importance, as well as its relationship with the equality concept. At first sight, the defense of the own identity and the differences of the own group in relation to other groups or the majority of the society is a fight that necessarily is against the use of the concept of equality. Trying to swim against the current of this first impression, that is dominant in a big part of the writings on this thematic, we analyze in this article, the intimate relationship that exists between the equality, on the one hand, and the difference and identity on the other hand. The argumentation includes references to the corresponding theoretical concepts and its philosophical context, as well as references to the reality and political history, which correspond to the terms of equality, identity and difference. In the conceptual aspect, as well as in the historical/political, it is necessary to start the reflection with the fact that the two ideas and realities - homogenization and heterogenization - are based on the same political and theoretical movement: the modern bourgeois society and the corresponding philosophy of enlightenment. Within these two systems, a solution to the problem of identity/difference versus equality is structurally impossible and "forced solutions" that ignore this, pay the liberation of a certain type of repression or exclusion with a new repression or exclusion. Of that, human history is full and there is no sense to repeat the same error over and over again

: City; Identity; Difference; Equality.

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