Many studies of diverse urban neighbourhoods have identified that the people who live in these neighbourhoods tend to live separate lives based on shared characteristics such as ethnicity, national origin or religion. In his study of Rogers Park in Chicago, Lowell Livezey refers to these as "ethnoracial enclaves". Steven Vertovec"s concept of superdiversity, however, appears to question this assuming a certain level of independence between different kinds of diversity (ethnicity, language, national origin, religion, legal status, etc.). In my study of Handsworth in Birmingham, UK, I argued that this independence of the variables of diversity allowed people to choose the identity that most suited their needs at the time and that, in the conversations I listened to, they chose identities that brought people together rather than those that set them apart. This paper explores the idea of the independence of the various variables of diversity as assumed in the use of the term "superdiversity" and uses census data from the 2011 census of England and Wales to test this assumption in relation to the city of Birmingham and the specific neighbourhood of Handsworth. * * * Introduction: journeys down two roads In his large-scale ethnographic study of congregations and communities in Chicago, Lowell Livezey (2000) identified the northern neighbourhood of Rogers Park as probably the most diverse, both ethnically and religiously, within the whole of Chicago. In his paper Livezey describes a journey down Devon Street, the central shopping street of Rogers Park, running from the coast of Lake Michigan and heading inland. What this journey illustrates is a series of different districts along the road, each of which is identified with a specific ethnic and religious group. So Livezey talks about moving from a Jewish to an Indian, to an "Indo-Pakistani" to a Mexican area of the street (2000, pp. 134-5), each of which is reflected in a series of distinctive religious buildings and community centres. This leads Livezey to coin the phrase