Mapping Superdiversity

Abstract

This chapter maps the concept of superdiversity in relation to debates in human geography on mobilities, spatial complexity, globalization, and conviviality. Through framing superdiversity as a spatial concept, the chapter attempts to answer the question of what superdiversity refers to, reflecting on how it manifests through spatial scales from the global, to urban, to local. It argues that this spatial approach is important for investigating how superdiversity as a concept responds to a relational condition of time-space compression that involves global metropoles and small localities; the mobile and immobile; the “majority” and “minority.” This approach questions the extent to which superdiversity is an urban condition by engaging with debates on transnational urbanism, glocalization, and relational urban ontologies. Exploring superdiversity as a local experience, it draws attention to the neighborhood as a translocal, multiscalar site for researching the more-than-representational experience of living with difference. The chapter examines how the superdiversity concept can respond to the multiplicity of city life and provide a lens through which to address the power-geometries of social differentiation. Reflecting on empirical research, it argues that using superdiversity in tandem with other key geographical concepts can facilitate a nuanced understanding of the social and cultural complexities, the inequalities, and the affective experience of living together.