Comparing Super Diversity

The concept of ‘super-diversity’ has received considerable attention since it was introduced in Ethnic and Racial Studies in 2007, reflecting a broadening interest in finding new ways to talk about contemporary social complexity. This book brings together a collection of essays which empirically and theoretically examine super-diversity and the multi-dimensional shifts in migration patterns to which the notion refers. These shifts entail a worldwide diversification of migration channels, differentiations of legal statuses, diverging patterns of gender and age, and variance in migrants’ human capital. Across the contributions, super-diversity is subject to two modes of comparison: (a) side-by-side studies contrasting different places and emergent conditions of super-diversity; and (b) juxtaposed arguments that have differentially found use in utilizing or criticizing ‘super-diversity’ descriptively, methodologically or with reference to policy and public practice. The contributions discuss super-diversity and its implications in nine cities located in eight countries and four continents. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

How do people deal with diversity in deprived and mixed urban neighbourhoods? This edited collection provides a comparative international perspective on superdiversity in cities, with explicit attention given to social inequality and social exclusion on a neighbourhood level. Although public discourses on urban diversity are often negative, this book focuses on how residents actively and creatively come and live together through micro-level interactions. By deliberately taking an international perspective on the daily lives of residents, the book uncovers the ways in which national and local contexts shape living in diversity. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and students of poverty, segregation and social mix, conviviality, the effects of international migration, urban and neighbourhood policies and governance, multiculturality, social networks, social cohesion, social mobility, and super-diversity.

Superdiversity explores processes of diversification and the complex, emergent social configurations that now supersede prior forms of diversity in societies around the world. Migration plays a key role in these processes, bringing changes not just in social, cultural, religious, and linguistic phenomena, but also in the ways that these phenomena combine with others like gender, age, and legal status. The concept of superdiversity has been adopted by scholars across the social sciences in order to address a variety of forms, modes, and outcomes of diversification. Central to this field is the relationship between social categorization and social organization, including stratification and inequality. Increasingly complex categories of social “difference” have significant impacts across scales, from entire societies to individual identities. While diversification is often met with simplifying stereotypes, threat narratives, and expressions of antagonism, superdiversity encourages a perspective on difference as comprising multiple social processes, flexible collective meanings, and overlapping personal and group identities. A superdiversity approach encourages the re-evaluation and recognition of social categories as multidimensional, unfixed, and porous as opposed to views based on hardened, one-dimensional thinking about groups. Diversification and increasing social complexity are bound to continue, if not intensify, in light of climate change. This will have profound impacts on the nature of global migration, social relations, and inequalities. Superdiversity presents a convincing case for recognizing new social formations created by changing migration patterns and calls for a re-thinking of public policy and social scientific approaches to social difference. This introduction to the multidisciplinary concept of superdiversity will be of considerable interest to students and researchers in a range of fields in the humanities and social sciences. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Superdiversity provides an accessible and authoritative overview of this growing area, the linguistic analysis of interaction in superdiverse cities. Developed as a descriptive term to account for the increasingly stratified processes and effects of migration in Western Europe, ‘superdiversity’ has the potential to contribute to an enhanced understanding of mobility, complexity, and change, with theoretical, practical, global, and methodological reach. With seven sections edited by leading names, the handbook includes 35 state-of-the art chapters from international authorities. The handbook adopts a truly interdisciplinary approach, covering: Cultural heritage Sport Law Education Business and entrepreneurship. The result is a truly comprehensive account of how people live, work and communicate in superdiverse spaces. This volume is key reading for all those engaged in the study and research of Language and Superdiversity within Applied Linguistics, Linguistic Anthropology and related areas.

Presenting several in-depth studies, this book explores how super-diversity operates in every-day relations and interactions in a variety of urban settings in Western Europe and the United States. The contributors raise a broad range of questions about the nature and effects of super-diversity. They ask if a quantitative increase in demographic diversity makes a qualitative difference in how diversity is experienced in urban neighborhoods, and what are the consequences of demographic change when people from a wide range of countries and social backgrounds live together in urban neighborhoods. The question at the core of the book is to what extent, and in what contexts, super-diversity leads to either the normalization of diversity or to added hostility towards and amongst those in different ethnic, racial, and religious groups. In cases where there is no particular ethno-racial or religious majority, are certain long-established groups able to continue to exert economic and political power, and is this continued economic and political dominance actually often facilitated by super-diversity? With contributions from a number of European countries as well as the USA, this book will be of interest to researchers studying contemporary migration and ethnic diversity. It will also spark discussion amongst those focusing on multiculturalism in urban environments. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

This open access book discusses Rotterdam as clear example of a superdiverse city that is only reluctantly coming to terms with this new reality. Rotterdam, as is true for many post-industrial cities, has seen a considerable backlash against migration and diversity: the populist party Leefbaar Rotterdam of the late Pim Fortuyn is already for many years the largest party in the city. At the same time Rotterdam has become a majority minority city where the people of Dutch descent have become a numerical minority themselves. The book explores how Rotterdam is coming to terms with superdiversity, by an analysis of its migration history of the city, the composition of the migrant population and the Dutch working class population, local politics and by a comparison with Amsterdam and other cities. As such it contributes to a better understanding not just of how and why super-diverse cities emerge but also how and why the reaction to a super-diverse reality can be so different. By focusing on different aspects of superdiversity, coming from different angles and various disciplinary backgrounds, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in migration, policy sciences, urban studies and urban sociology, as well as policymakers and the broader public.

"Over the past three decades, there has been a global sea-change in the nature of international migration. In myriad places around the world this kind of deep shift has had significant impacts on the local configurations and dynamics of diversity. Old and new immigration sites across the world have experienced rapid and increasing movements of people from more varied national, ethnic, linguistic and religious backgrounds. These movements have emerged along with a diversification of migration channels and legal statuses and, more broadly, greater societal attention towards identity politics Worldwide, in concurrent but differing ways, these migration-driven trends are deeply transforming societies in complex ways spanning social, demographic, cultural, economic and political structures. Now across a range of disciplines and literatures, such complex transformation processes and patterns are summarized by the concept of superdiversity (Vertovec 2007). As the world emerged from the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, we saw Western democracies promoting the universalisation of liberal democracy and its values (Fukuyama 1992). The consolidation of the international human rights regime, with human rights becoming the 'lingua franca of global moral thought' (Ignatieff 2001: 53), was part of this process (Douzinas 2007). That move provided the ideological scaffolding for neoliberal economic globalisation which relied on enhanced international circulation and interdependence of capitals, goods, services, and supply chains. With goods and services, also human mobility grew, and with increased material and more recently digital connectivity, new destinations and routes became appealing, available, and affordable (IOM 2021). Meanwhile, the 'end of history' and the consolidation of the post-Cold War geopolitical order didn't come peacefully and triggered a series of regional and international conflicts that in turn led to a growth of international and internal displacement globally, a trend that is now increasingly fuelled by climate change and environment degradation acting as key factor in migration dynamics (Black et al 2011). International migration is both an effect and a driver of these developments. It crucially contributes to establish and consolidate transnational networks and diasporic communities, while at the same time it is a key contributor to the diversification of host societies. In myriad settings around the world, there are people with more varied ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious, and legal status characteristics than ever before - each set of characteristics intersecting differently with others as well as with age, gender, and class. As a result, "the world is much more diverse on multiple dimensions and at many levels, typified by the salience of differences and their dynamic intersections" (Jones and Dovidio 2018: 45). Contemporary immigration societies have become increasingly diverse, layered, and unequal. Indeed, 'the processes of neoliberal globalization have gradually loosened labour protections, restructured the welfare system, delocalized state borders, and led to widening inequalities' (Gonzales and Sigona 2017: 3), putting pressure on the connection between state, territory and residents, transforming traditional notions of sovereignty and citizenship, while also giving rise to a host of new non-state actors operating transnationally (Sassen 2006; Castles 2001). As evidenced by its ubiquity across the social sciences, superdiversity is one of the most prominent contemporary concepts advancing current understanding of international migration and its social implications. The numerous social scientific debates, approaches and methodologies that have been developed in light of superdiversity speak to each other but have not yet been brought together in a single volume. This handbook fills this gap in the literature, offering students, educators, researchers and practitioners a much sought-after compendium of central advances made in studying complex social transformations in light of superdiversity. The chapters take stock of some of the advances in the field and lay out the importance of engaging with complex social transformations in light of migration-driven change. In this introduction we frame the discussions that follow by first elaborating the notion of complex social transformations and its resulting complexities, then providing an overview of how we structured the book and the types of chapters you will find in the different sections of this handbook. "--