Since 2001, as the social and spatial compositions of multiculture and migration have become more complicated and diverse, geography has moved back to the centre of policy, political, and academic arguments about cultural difference and ethnic diversity in England. This spatial turn is most obvious in preoccupations with notions of increasing ethnic segregation, but it is also apparent in discussions of the possibility of everyday multicultural exchanges in relationally understood places. Responding to the work of others on these questions and in these places, and informed by data from research exploring Ghanaian and Somali migrant settlement in Milton Keynes, we review some of the quantitative and qualitative evidence being drawn on in academic, policy, and political debates about contemporary multiculture. We problematise the dominance of the concept of segregation in these debates and examine the value of the concept of conviviality for understanding the ways in which multiculture is lived.
IntroductionThe ways in which ethnic and cultural difference is lived and managed have been at the centre of debates across the social sciences in a range of national and globalised settings (see, eg. . Although these are transnational debates, in the sense that similar issues are considered in a range of contexts, they have quite specific national and local expressions. There is, however, a marked tension in the discussion between those who focus on the identification of a continuing process of segregation between ethnic groups and those who highlight the more interactive negotiations of multiculture. Here the issue is explored through the recent experience in England, where the tension has been apparent not only in the contributions made by academics but also in the pronouncements of politicians and in developing forms of policy practice.