Mid-Term Report Summary - GLOBALDIVERCITIES (Migration and New Diversities in Global Cities: Comparatively Conceiving, Observing and Visualizing Diversification in Urban Public Spaces)
Over the past thirty years, global migration flows show profound diversification of migrants’ nationality, ethnicity, language, gender balance, age, human capital and legal status. Everywhere, migrants with complex ‘new diversity’ traits dwell particularly in cities alongside people from previous, ‘old diversity’ waves. The dynamics of diversification – despite their increasing ubiquity – remain seriously under-researched. We know little about how people in diversifying urban settings create new patterns of coexistence, or how and why they might tend toward conflict.
The core research question of the GlobaldiverCities project is: In public spaces compared across cities, what accounts for similarities and differences in social and spatial patterns that arise under conditions of diversification, when new diversity-meets-old diversity? The project entails inter-disciplinary, multi-method research in New York (a classic city of immigration with new global migrant flows in a broadly supportive political context), Singapore (dominated by racial-cultural politics, and wholly dependent on new, highly restricted migrants), and Johannesburg (emerging from Apartheid with tensions around unregulated new, pan-African migrant flows). Spanning social scientific disciplines to investigate the changing nature of diversity and its socio-spatial patterns, strategic methods entail ‘conceiving’ superdiversity (exploring how old and new diversities are locally understood), ‘observing’ superdiversity (undertaking ethnographies of emergent modes of interaction, both fleeting and sustained) and ‘visualizing’ superdiversity (using film, images, interactive graphics and innovative data mapping to show new socio-spatial patterns). Findings will significantly advance social scientific understanding of global urban diversification trends.
Some early analyses are described in terms of the following. New diversities are often experienced through ‘route-ines’: thee are patterns of encounter that arise from fleeting interactions – or, indeed, merely regular observations of others – along habitually travelled pathways or routes (to work, shopping or leisure activities). Those involved in the encounters might both be ‘meeting in motion’, or one party might be moving through a given space while the other is stationary (e.g. waiting for transportation). Within these socio-spatial patterns, (a) a distinct ‘other’ (usually a combination of variables comprising ethnicity/race, language, gender, age, migration status and class) is repeatedly observed along a route, (b) a mode of interaction often arises and becomes methodically routinized between the actors (entailing variations on a kind of scripted exchange of words and practices), or (c) little or no actual social interaction takes place, but the actors nevertheless become ‘familiar strangers’.
Many people are indeed excluded from spaces of encounter, either by their own decisions (based on social discomfort, fear of confrontation or lack of physical security) or directly by others (through racist acts, policing or other more subtler modes of making people unwelcome). Such social and spatial patterns of social segregation, or of selectively ‘balkanizing’ spaces (ethnically or linguistically, or as ‘safe’ areas for people in precarious situations), bear directly on the ways configurations of diversification develop, how everyday diversity dynamics relate to popular representations, and how ‘diversity’ is encountered on non-segregated spaces.
Of course a range of contextual variables importantly play into the factors that influence similarities and differences between our three case sites (including social history, political economy, national and urban policies, demographics and so on). However, beyond these fundamental contextual factors, we can identify a further set of criteria relating directly to the creation and consistency of social and spatial patterns: we address these in terms of 1. Physical spatiality (layout and materiality of particular public spaces), 2. Organizing principles (written and unwritten, often embodied, rules and expectations of conduct), and 3. Contours of control (unevenly distributed regulations and constraints on the movement and activity of individuals and groups).
The core research question of the GlobaldiverCities project is: In public spaces compared across cities, what accounts for similarities and differences in social and spatial patterns that arise under conditions of diversification, when new diversity-meets-old diversity? The project entails inter-disciplinary, multi-method research in New York (a classic city of immigration with new global migrant flows in a broadly supportive political context), Singapore (dominated by racial-cultural politics, and wholly dependent on new, highly restricted migrants), and Johannesburg (emerging from Apartheid with tensions around unregulated new, pan-African migrant flows). Spanning social scientific disciplines to investigate the changing nature of diversity and its socio-spatial patterns, strategic methods entail ‘conceiving’ superdiversity (exploring how old and new diversities are locally understood), ‘observing’ superdiversity (undertaking ethnographies of emergent modes of interaction, both fleeting and sustained) and ‘visualizing’ superdiversity (using film, images, interactive graphics and innovative data mapping to show new socio-spatial patterns). Findings will significantly advance social scientific understanding of global urban diversification trends.
Some early analyses are described in terms of the following. New diversities are often experienced through ‘route-ines’: thee are patterns of encounter that arise from fleeting interactions – or, indeed, merely regular observations of others – along habitually travelled pathways or routes (to work, shopping or leisure activities). Those involved in the encounters might both be ‘meeting in motion’, or one party might be moving through a given space while the other is stationary (e.g. waiting for transportation). Within these socio-spatial patterns, (a) a distinct ‘other’ (usually a combination of variables comprising ethnicity/race, language, gender, age, migration status and class) is repeatedly observed along a route, (b) a mode of interaction often arises and becomes methodically routinized between the actors (entailing variations on a kind of scripted exchange of words and practices), or (c) little or no actual social interaction takes place, but the actors nevertheless become ‘familiar strangers’.
Many people are indeed excluded from spaces of encounter, either by their own decisions (based on social discomfort, fear of confrontation or lack of physical security) or directly by others (through racist acts, policing or other more subtler modes of making people unwelcome). Such social and spatial patterns of social segregation, or of selectively ‘balkanizing’ spaces (ethnically or linguistically, or as ‘safe’ areas for people in precarious situations), bear directly on the ways configurations of diversification develop, how everyday diversity dynamics relate to popular representations, and how ‘diversity’ is encountered on non-segregated spaces.
Of course a range of contextual variables importantly play into the factors that influence similarities and differences between our three case sites (including social history, political economy, national and urban policies, demographics and so on). However, beyond these fundamental contextual factors, we can identify a further set of criteria relating directly to the creation and consistency of social and spatial patterns: we address these in terms of 1. Physical spatiality (layout and materiality of particular public spaces), 2. Organizing principles (written and unwritten, often embodied, rules and expectations of conduct), and 3. Contours of control (unevenly distributed regulations and constraints on the movement and activity of individuals and groups).