Diversities Old and New

How can people live together, with ever more diverse characteristics, in the world’s rapidly expanding cities? The UN estimates a doubling of the world’s urban population by 2050. Meanwhile, 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 in cities alongside people from previous, ’old diversity’ waves. That is, since new migrants tend to inhabit those urban spaces which still play host to migrants from previous waves, these new patterns of diversification are ’layered’ on top of pre-existing patterns of diversity. How do prior conditions of diversity affect the incorporation of new migrants who are characterized by significantly different traits? With these issues in mind, this book address the core research question: 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? Based on a five-year comparative research project carried out by a multi-disciplinary team, Diversities Old and New provides findings from 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 sociology, anthropology and human geography, the book seeks to analyze the changing nature of diversity and it’s socio-spatial patterns in major cities around the world. In addition to rich ethnographic descriptions and robust sociological examination concerning some of the key urban processes of our age, Diversities Old And New also provides methodological innovations, including visual methods, which have been utilized to gather and analyze data. More information on these innovations can be found using the QR code below.