Introduction: super-diversity in everyday life

ABSTRACT

In the introduction to this special issue, we consider a number of questions central to the study of super-diversity in urban contexts in Western Europe and the United States. We begin with a discussion of why the super-diversity concept has had more impact on scholarship in Western Europe than the United States, where it has had much less resonance. We explore the nature and effects of super-diversity for ongoing social relations in everyday life, considering both the positive and negative consequences. And we conclude with a consideration of some unfulfilled promises of super-diversity, including integrating the dimension of power into the analyses as well as finding ways to examine the many bases and intersections of different forms of diversity, while at the same time not downplaying the role of continued and long-term inequalities, such as race and class, that typically remain of primary importance in super-diverse settings.

KEYWORDS:

• Super-diversity
• immigration
• urban
• ethnicity
• race
• intergroup relations

The concept of super-diversity has captured the imagination of social scientists who study contemporary immigration and ethnic diversity, especially in Western Europe. The term was coined, and the concept put forward, by Vertovec (2007) a decade ago in an Ethnic and Racial Studies article, “Super-diversity and its Implications”, which has turned out to be the most highly cited article in the journal’s forty year history. Over the past ten years, super-diversity has become a buzzword among scholars, policymakers, urban planners, and social workers, at least in Western Europe, and has begun to have some impact on migration studies on the other side of the Atlantic, as well. Indeed, Western European scholars and social policy analysts concerned with immigration, integration, and ethnic diversity who fail to explicitly take into account the notion of super-diversity run the risk of being reproached for neglecting the “new multicultural condition of the twenty-first century” (Sarah Neal and Allan Cochrane cited in Meissner and Vertovec 2015, 542).

The basic argument advanced for coining the term and developing the concept is that it describes changing patterns of global migration flows of the post-World War II decades that have entailed the movement of people from more varied national, ethnic, linguistic, and religious backgrounds, who occupy more varied legal statuses, and who bring a wide range of human capital (education, work skills, and experience). Super-diversity, as Wessendorf (2014, 2) puts it, is a lens to describe “an exceptional demographic situation characterized by the multiplication of social categories within specific localities”. The notion of super-diversity has been presented as challenging dominant approaches in “conventional migration studies” by moving beyond an “ethno-focal lens” (or “groupism”, to borrow Brubaker’s [2004] term) and calling for greater attention to other bases of differentiation – such as gender, social class, sexual orientation, age, legal status, and language – within each ethnic or national origin group to better understand the dynamics of their inclusion or exclusion (Vertovec 2007, 1025, 1039).

One of the great benefits of a super-diversity lens is that, like other new sociological concepts, it has the virtue of bringing new perspectives to familiar issues and advancing our understanding of social processes by reconstituting our perceptual field and identifying connections not previously seen or emphasized (cf. Portes 1997). The concept, however, is still in its infancy, and in this special issue, we heed Vertovec’s explicit call to “critically interrogate, refine and extrapolate” the notion of super-diversity (Meissner and Vertovec 2015, 542). We do this by bringing together a series of in-depth studies on how super-diversity unfolds and operates in concrete every-day relations and interactions in a variety of settings in Western Europe as well as the United States.

The articles raise a broad range of questions about the nature and effects of super-diversity. One basic question is whether a quantitative increase in demographic diversity, marked, for example, by a growing number of ethno-racial groups, makes a qualitative difference in how diversity is experienced in urban settings. Or to put it another way: what are the actual consequences and outcomes of demographic change when people from a wide range of countries and social backgrounds now live together in urban neighborhoods? A central issue is the extent to which, and in what contexts, super-diversity leads to the normalization of diversity or, alternatively, to added hostility to and conflicts among those in different ethnic, racial, and religious groups. Another analytic dimension is also pertinent. Although no one ethno-racial or religious group may numerically dominate in particular areas or cities, are certain long-established groups able to continue to exert economic and political power? Indeed, and perhaps paradoxically, is this continued economic and, especially political, dominance actually often facilitated by super-diversity?

As for what might be called the “diversification of diversity”, an analytic concern is to what degree, and under what circumstances, certain bases of social differentiation which cross-cut national origin or ethnic group affiliation (especially class and race) remain central in super-diverse settings. All differences or bases of diversity, in other words, are not equal, and how and why they vary in significance and impact are an important subject for analysis. Then, too, there is the fact that even scholars concerned with super-diversity who start out writing about different forms of diversity in contemporary global cities, such as generation, sexuality, gender, legal status, and class, often end up focusing on ethnicity, or even crude proxies for ethnicity, in their work – for instance, using national origin groups as the key units of analysis or characterizing cities as majority–minority, that is, those where whites are no longer a majority in the United States or long-established natives a majority in Europe.

Finally, there are questions about the broader societal impact of super-diversity. If scholars of super-diversity generally focus on racial and ethnic minorities, and even more specifically, immigrants and their children, a critical issue is what impact the super-diversity of cities and nations has for the so-called “native” population. To put it in rather stark terms: is the incorporation of an array of new ethnic and racial minorities leading to a redefining of the societal mainstream or what it means to be “native”?

The introduction begins to tackle these questions while, in the process, drawing on and highlighting key points in the articles in this special issue. We start out with an intriguing transatlantic question: why has the super-diversity concept had more impact on scholarship in Western Europe than the United States, where it has had much less resonance? We consider, among other things, how much this has to do with the historical experience of immigration and urban diversity on the two sides of the Atlantic as well as earlier models of or theories about diversity that have been dominant there. Next, we explore the nature and effects of super-diversity for ongoing social relations in everyday life, considering both the positive and negative consequences. We conclude with a consideration of some as yet unfulfilled promises of super-diversity, including integrating the dimension of power into the analyses as well as finding ways to examine the many bases and intersections of different forms of diversity, while at the same time not downplaying the role of continued and long-term inequalities, such as race and class, that typically remain of primary importance in super-diverse settings.

Super-diversity on the two sides of the Atlantic

The speed with which the concept of super-diversity has been embraced by students of the migrant-receiving societies of Western Europe has been truly impressive. It has been used far less often by students of diversity in the United States (as noted by Tran, this issue). This is striking, in part, because the demographic preconditions for super-diversity – migration from a wide variety of source countries and the creation of “no majority” cities, as well as increasing internal diversity among migrant and ethnic groups – are at least as common in the United States today as in Europe. Some of the difference may simply reflect the fact that Americans have used other terminology and concepts to do at least some of the “work” super-diversity does in Europe. However, we argue that it also reflects the different histories and different traditions of urban politics in Western Europe and the United States that analysts bring to their scholarship on the two sides of the Atlantic.

Writings on urban diversity in the United States, for one thing, inevitably have been influenced by the presence of and barriers facing African Americans – a historical legacy, of course, of African slavery on U.S. soil, legal segregation, and ghettoization. American urban scholars have long recognized that social and political life works differently in places divided between two or three clearly bounded and unequal ethnic or racial groups, on the one hand, and places in which there are a variety of groups with what Alba (2009) terms more blurred and porous boundaries, on the other. The classic example of the former would be rigidly racially segregated cities in the early and mid-twentieth century United States in which the population was comprised of blacks and whites who were sharply (and in the case of the southern U.S., legally) separated from each other and lived most of their lives among those in their own racial group. Of course, as observers have long pointed out, both the black and white communities were internally diverse in terms of class, gender, ethnic origin, and so on (see Du Bois 1899; Drake and Cayton 1945). But particularly for African Americans, that fact did not matter very much. Race remained the “master status” in shaping most important aspects of social life. Class, educational status, even ethnicity all paled in comparison.

At the same time, the long and continuous history of immigration to and ethnic diversity in northern cities and the taken-for-granted legitimacy and central role of urban ethnic politics have also shaped scholarly thinking about urban diversity in the United States (see Foner 2017). In Beyond the Melting Pot, Glazer and Moynihan (1963), writing about mid-twentieth century urban America, suggested that urban politics operated differently in cities characterized by a two-group black/white divide and strict black/white segregation, what they termed the “southern model”, than in cities like New York, characterized by what they called the “northern model”, in which a wide variety of ethnic (immigrant-origin) groups contested for power, with no one-group permanently dominant. Their claim for such hurly-burly pluralist competition and cross-cutting alliances between and across ethnic groups in northern immigrant cities was clearly overly rosy, ignoring, among other things, the continued high degree of black–white residential segregation there. Yet it is worth remembering that Glazer and Moynihan saw cities that lacked a clear ethnic majority, of which New York was offered as the premier example, as very different in their politics and intergroup relations than cities in which social and institutional life was organized around a central power cleavage between blacks and whites. Skerry (1993) has made a similar argument in his comparison of Mexican Americans in cities like San Antonio, Texas, in which power was historically divided between highly segregated Mexican and Anglo communities, and immigrant cities with a greater variety of ethnic and class communities such as Los Angeles.

More recent analyses have built on the long concern in American urban politics with ethnic diversity, but with new twists and turns. In the wake of the enormous post-1965 immigration and increased ethnic diversity it has brought, John Mollenkopf has argued that the wide variety of ethnic groups and lack of demographic dominance by any one group in electoral politics in contemporary New York (and a number of other “no majority” cities) has led to a situation where shifting ethnic boundaries and cross-ethnic alliances promote a more complex and multi-faceted politics than is typical in cities with a few large and clearly bounded groups. Paradoxically, in highly diverse American cities, the lack of a unified nonwhite group – which is splintered by ethnic divisions – has at times allowed native whites to continue domination of many aspects of political and social life long after they have become a numerical minority (Mollenkopf 2003, 2014).

Another concept competing at least to some degree with super-diversity is the notion of intersectionality. While this concept is widely used on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly among feminist scholars, it has probably had broader acceptance in the United States (see, for example, Patricia Hill Collins’s American Sociological Association presidential address, Collins 2015). The intersectionality approach highlights the fact that no person is reducible to a single identity. Despite the centrality of race and ethnicity in social life, these identities are experienced in interaction with other identities such as gender, sexual orientation, and religion. Or to put it another way, individuals stand at the intersection of multiple identities, despite the tendency of some social scientists, and sometimes ethnic group leaders, to reduce people to a single identity. Indeed, like super-diversity, the intersectionality perspective provides a critique of the ways in which racial and ethnic diversity is generally studied in the United States, particularly in quantitative analysis that emphasizes group comparisons (“the Mexicans do this, the Chinese do that”) to such an extent that other possibly more important identities can be obscured.

As for the European side, no doubt some of the appeal of the super-diversity concept is that it provides an alternative to the increasingly politically unpopular notion of multiculturalism. The (false) belief that multiculturalism has been a failure has become a cliché in European policy discussions, far more so than in the United States. In part, this has to do with the very meaning of the term on the two sides of the Atlantic. In Western Europe, multiculturalism is often associated with state policies supporting the political accommodation of cultural practices, traditions, and identities among immigrant origin groups, policies which often have proved unpopular. In the United States, by contrast, multiculturalism is often associated with a vague cultural orientation favouring inclusion and diversity and attempts in the post-civil rights era to recognize the experiences and contributions of African Americans, non-white immigrants, and other previously marginalized groups in American history and national identity, especially in schools. While much of the attack on multiculturalism in Europe is simply a mask for intolerance and bigotry, it is also true, as Sen (2006) notes, that in practice some versions of multiculturalism have the potential to reinforce what he labels “plural monoculturalism” (or what also might be called hard boundary multiculturalism) in which different ethnic communities may be encouraged to remain largely separate culturally, socially, and geographically or, as he puts it, different traditions live side by side without the twain meeting. The fear then is that multiculturalism is a threat to social cohesion. Another fear is that the tolerance of ethnic group differences can go hand in hand with intolerance of other forms of difference within ethnic or religious communities – traditional Muslim intolerance of homosexuals or Orthodox Jewish intolerance of feminists, for example.

In contrast to multiculturalism, super-diversity seems more a descriptive than a normative concept, not associated with any specific government policy or policies; it is also closer to and has come to be associated with descriptions of a soft boundary multiculturalism, in which individuals of diverse backgrounds may come together and form bonds based on a variety of identities or interests. This is partly a result of new demographic realities. In cities and communities with a huge variety of internally varied groups, interactions and experiences in everyday life are likely to cut across group boundaries. A degree of integration emerges, not necessarily because newcomers share social and institutional spaces with long time natives but because diverse newcomers inevitably share them with each other (Crul 2016). There are strong forces pushing for a “lingua franca” (both literally and figuratively). While these dynamics are usually put forward as a description of demographic reality, super-diversity can sometimes take on a normative dimension, particularly in discussions of public policy. In this regard, super-diversity clearly is a more reassuring and more optimistic vision than the political caricature of a “failed multiculturalism” of socially isolated groups suggests. As such the super-diversity concept might provide a chance to envision a kind of street-level cosmopolitanism in which different cultures can be appreciated without making allegiance to one group mandatory.

Does European style super-diversity add a dimension to the analysis of the experience of highly diverse settings that goes beyond the insights of American studies of urban politics or those emphasizing intersectionality? When it comes to understanding, and indeed bidding us to focus on, the everyday life experiences and social relations of those living in increasingly diverse cities, we think that it does. It is important, however, not to romanticize super-diverse communities as (to borrow the title of one study of Queens, New York) “the future of us all” (Sanjek 1999). As both recent history and some of the articles in this issue (e.g. Wekker) show, extreme diversity is no guarantee of a more cosmopolitan outlook on either side of the Atlantic.

The effects of super-diversity on everyday interactions

Ultimately, a key issue is what consequences super-diversity has for everyday interactions and relationships. How has the diversification of diversity in many urban areas around the world affected social life on the local level? How do people get along in contexts where almost everyone comes from somewhere else? (Wessendorf 2014, 2).

Because the study of super-diversity is relatively new, we know little about how super-diversity affects day-to-day intergroup relations, including how, and why, these effects differ in cities and countries or varied contexts within them. The research that is available on super-diversity in particular places also typically examines the impact of one kind of diversity, ethnoracial, and is related to migration flows, although ethnoracial origin is often used as a proxy for other differences such as language, culture, and religion. The studies, moreover, do not always agree on the impacts. On one side, are analyses emphasizing the positive consequences of super-diversity for intergroup relations; on the other, are studies that stress negative effects. To some degree, these different emphases echo an earlier divide in the literature on diversity and intergroup contact, with a meta-analysis of hundreds of intergroup contact studies supporting the “contact hypothesis”, showing that contact diminishes intergroup prejudice (Pettigrew and Tropp 2008); in contrast, Putnam (2007) has argued that greater ethnic diversity reduces social solidarity so that in ethnically and racially diverse neighbourhoods people tend to “hunker down” – withdrawing from collective life and distrusting their neighbours – and stick to their own kind in mutually antagonistic sub-communities.

Perhaps the best-known examination of super-diversity at the local level is Wessendorf’s (2014) ethnography on London’s borough of Hackney, which comes down squarely on the positive side. Hackney, one of Britain’s most ethnically diverse boroughs, is about a third white British, with other residents having origins in more than 100 countries and speaking more than 100 languages, including significant numbers of West Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, and South Asians as well as Turks, Chinese, and Poles. Far from hunkering down in the face of super-diversity, Hackney residents have learned to live with it. Diversity has become normal, taken for granted, and unsurprising – or, in Wessendorf’s phrase, commonplace in public space, such as in street markets, libraries, hospitals, supermarkets, post offices, and banks as well in the parochial realm of schools, for example, and associations. Indeed, an ethos of mixing has developed in which it has come to be expected that people should mix and interact with residents of other backgrounds in public space and associations (Wessendorf 2013). At the same time, however, in the private realm of friends and relatives, people’s closest ties are with those most like themselves in terms of ethnicity, race, and class.

Is Hackney an unusual case of commonplace diversity? Wessendorf (2014) thinks not. Yes, it has a long history of ethnic diversity, a public and political discourse that celebrates diversity, and like other European cities, a culture of walking, public transport, and sharing of public (and often publicly funded) spaces and organizations that attract and reach out to a broad spectrum of the population. But conditions associated with super-diversity itself, she argues, where multiple dimensions of difference are not perfectly correlated, can reduce the potential for polarizing loyalties along any one single fault line, thereby increasing acceptance of social diversity. As Coser (1956, 77) put it many years ago, when the lines of conflict between groups in a society, or we would add an urban neighbourhood, do not converge, no one single cleavage is likely to endanger its stability. Moreover, in Wessendorf’s (2014) analysis, the unavoidability of encounters in super-diverse urban localities with others who are different fosters a practical need to get along, at least on a superficial level, in public spheres, and a civility to diversity.

One feature of Hackney and other super-diverse areas that may be especially likely to lead to positive intergroup social relations is the absence of any one majority national origin or ethnoracial group that dominates numerically, culturally, and politically. Indeed, a question that arises from the articles in this issue that requires further discussion concerns the very definition of super-diversity: should the term only be applied to cities or neighbourhoods where no single ethnic group is a numerical majority – and as Fenneke Wekker (2017) puts it, dominates the public or semi-public sphere through sheer numbers – or is this majority–minority condition just one type of super-diversity?

Demography may operate in other positive ways in some neighbourhood institutions and associations in which people develop sustained and longer-term relationships. For example, the great diversity of ethnic groups in schools in many urban communities on both sides of the Atlantic encourages the development of interethnic friendships, since, among other things, at least some students have only a few members of their national origin group (who have the same homeland language) in their classes and grade (on relations among parents of students in ethnically diverse London schools see Neal, Vincent, and Iqbal 2016). Friendships among classmates are an example of what Richard Alba and Jan Willem Duyvendak (this issue) call horizontal interpersonal relations, in which imbalances of authority and power are relatively minimal; they suggest that the very tendency of research on super-diverse neighbourhoods to focus on these kind of relations has ended up highlighting contexts where interactions are likely to be less fraught and openly conflictual.

The articles in this issue also point to other factors that may lead to positive attitudes to diversity and to amicable relations among those in different ethnic groups in super-diverse settings. Among the highly educated pioneer migrants Wessendorf (2017) studied in East London, their educational and occupational backgrounds and ability to speak English enabled them to build networks and form friendships with people with similar backgrounds in different ethnic groups. The young white adults from Iowa and Minnesota discussed in Van Tran’s article (2017) were directly exposed to and became more comfortable with racial and ethnic diversity on college campuses; going to school or college together and intermingling in workplaces provided opportunities for members of the second generation in the New York area and San Diego, whom Tran also discusses, to develop friendships with, and more positive attitudes to, those from different ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds.

Super-diversity, to be sure, is not synonymous with amicable intergroup relations. Social relations in super-diverse neighbourhoods and institutional settings are not always positive, and tensions and conflicts may arise along some dimensions of difference. Diversity, moreover, is not just about difference but about inequalities based on these differences, and these too often have a significant – and often adverse – impact on interactions. Much as Wessendorf (2014) emphasizes commonplace diversity in her study of Hackney, she also makes clear that racial divisions between disadvantaged black youngsters and the rest of the borough’s population were a significant fault line: black youth were seen as threatening in public space and were involved in the riots that occurred in 2011. In general, commonplace diversity and negative attitudes toward and tensions with a particular group or groups in an urban community are not mutually exclusive but can go hand in hand.

It is not surprising that, as Back and Sinha (2016) put it, racism and multiculture coexist in London given its large black population, centrality of color-coded race, and history of racial inequalities and strained race relations between blacks and whites. It is also not surprising, given America’s dark history of slavery and racism, that divisions based on race are so prominent in American cities, including New York, which is a subject in two of the articles in the issue. New York City’s remarkably diverse post-1965 immigrant population with no one, or even two or three, numerically dominant national origin groups, its long history of successfully incorporating immigrants, and public discourse of tolerance, indeed celebration of ethnic diversity, has led to a great deal of optimism about and support for ethnic diversity among young adult second-generation New Yorkers, native white and nonwhite alike, as well as many friendships, positive interactions at work, and even romantic relationships that bring together individuals in different ethnic and racial groups. At the same time, racial inequalities remain entrenched in the city (Foner 2005, 2007, 2013; Kasinitz et al. 2008). New York City “remains deeply unequal in terms of race, highly [residentially] segregated, and occasionally hostile” (Waters 2014, 145). A large-scale study of the young adult second generation in the New York metropolitan area found that native blacks and West Indians reported the most discrimination; native blacks and West Indians also tended to work in predominantly black work sites. By contrast, many members of Hispanic groups and most Chinese respondents worked in racially mixed workplaces (Kasinitz et al. 2008).

 In her analysis of a community garden and public sculpture park in the super-diverse New York City neighbourhood of Astoria, Queens, Sofya Aptekar (2017) argues that while they might seem at first to be multicultural havens of super-diversity – bringing together people speaking different languages and of different ages, ethnicities, religions, and socio-economic status – these sites are, in fact, divided by racial (as well as class) inequalities that shape interactions in ways that can be disempowering and exclusionary for some community residents. Although people worked on projects in the community garden with others very different from themselves, Aptekar describes interactions that empowered better-off whites who, owing to their class and race, were able to impose their aesthetic sensibilities, including what plants would be cultivated and how the garden would look. As for the public sculpture park, African Americans felt uncomfortable going there on their own even though it was a three-minute walk from the predominantly African American public housing where they lived; in contrast, more affluent, mostly white visitors, living locally or visiting, used the park more openly and freely. Events at the park to celebrate the diversity of the borough of Queens emphasized immigration-driven diversity, leaving African Americans, especially the lower-class African Americans who lived nearby, out of the loop.

Although not a matter of daily interactions in urban communities, it is worth mentioning the impact of super-diversity on the political sphere in New York since research indicates that, at least up until now, super-diversity has not prevented whites (now only a third of the population) from continuing to hold the top elected position of mayor (excluding one term in the early 1990s when an African American, David Dinkins, held this office). At least so far, the difficulties of assembling alliances with a wide array of ethno-racial groups now necessary to win mayoral office have been greater for ethnic minorities – and super-diversity is part of the problem. It has, as we suggested earlier, contributed to whites’ ability to maintain mayoral political control in a kind of divide-and-rule manner, given that no racial/national-origin group in New York City is a clear majority and divisions among non-white ethnic minority groups have impeded them from uniting politically (e.g. Mollenkopf 2014). Nor has super-diversity averted political conflicts between immigrant-origin groups and native minorities (African Americans and Puerto Ricans) at lower levels of the city’s political system which have arisen, for example, when an African American and West Indian are vying for office in a district housing blacks of different national origins or a Dominican and Puerto Rican are competing for votes among a broad range of Latinos.

Across the Atlantic, the two articles in this issue drawing on ethnographic research in Amsterdam suggest some of the ways that public discourse and government policies in national and urban contexts, as well as the particular demographic configuration of local associations, can create or accentuate intergroup tensions and hostilities in super-diverse urban areas. Although Amsterdam can now be considered a majority–minority city (Crul 2016) – migrants and people with foreign-born parents are slightly more than half of the population – this has not necessarily translated into amicable relations, tolerance, and accommodation in local communities. At the national society level, Dutch political and public debate has been dominated by a harsh xenophobic discourse; a significant proportion of the native majority population sees cultural diversity as a growing problem, with an aggressive emphasis on the need for immigrants and their children, especially Muslims, to adopt “Judeo-Christian” or “Dutch” values and progressive ideals on such issues as gender equality, abortion, and sexuality (Alba and Duyvendak, 2017; Duyvendak 2011). The political discourse stigmatizing people of migrant background has had an impact at the neighbourhood level where, as Paul Mepschen argues in the case of the multi-ethnic area he studied, it has become entangled with another development: competition for scarce resources triggered by government urban policies. Specifically, he points to government urban renewal plans to demolish existing social housing and build new owner-occupied and high-rent homes leading to resentments among local native majority residents – who, following widespread use in the Netherlands, see themselves as “autochthones” or, literally, those born from the soil. Even before these plans have been carried out, middle-aged, native majority neighbourhood residents have felt that those of recent migrant origin (whom they view as allochthones or strangers and cultural outsiders) have been favoured in the distribution of social housing.

Fenneke Wekker’s article brings out another dynamic when it comes to associations and organizations in super-diverse areas: those that lack diversity can provide an environment that allows members to voice negative comments about – and even strengthen hostility toward and exclude – ethnic minority groups. Far from seeing diversity as commonplace or normal, the virtually all native white Dutch (and mostly elderly) visitors to the state-supported community centre she studied in a working-class super-diverse area of Amsterdam regularly and openly disparaged ethnic, racial, and religious others. Indeed, the centre ended up reinforcing hostile sentiments to these “others” and informally keeping out ethnic, racial, and religious “outsiders” who would feel uncomfortable and out of place there. Shared class, age, and generation, as well as race, ethnicity, and religion, fortified the centre regulars’ sense of “we”. In this regard, Wekker’s account leads to general questions about the way divisions along age, generational, and class lines can feed into and affect attitudes toward and relations with those in different ethnic and racial groups. The fact that the older white Amsterdammers who came to the community centre grew up in a much less ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse city no doubt played a role in their negative views of post-World II immigration-created diversity. At the same time, the centre’s middle-class management’s preaching of tolerance for ethnic and racial differences fell on deaf ears partly because of a class divide: the white native working class Dutch were aware of the manager’s and social workers’ disdain for them and resisted the notion that they had to change.

We have identified some of the sources of civility as well as tension and conflict among ethnoracial groups in super-diverse locales, but this is, admittedly, a beginning attempt. Clearly, the value of super-diversity as a concept depends, in good part, on understanding and specifying its consequences for social relations in urban communities, including the conditions under which it leads to social harmony as opposed to tension, topics on which we still have a lot to learn.

Unfulfilled promises of super-diversity

One of these decisive conditions, as argued by Alba and Duyvendak (this issue), might be the broader context in which neighbourhood relations are embedded. This wider, “vertical” context not only includes formal and informal institutions present in local settings (for example, schools and their curricula), but also a country’s discursive climate. At least to judge by the research the super-diversity concept has so far inspired, it seems best attuned to the normalized everyday diversity that sometimes characterizes horizontal interpersonal interactions in micro-settings with a very substantial immigrant presence. However, the concept often overlooks power differentials at a level beyond the neighbourhood. Or to phrase it somewhat differently, the super-diversity lens has so far been less able to capture the vertical phenomena that reflect the social, economic, and political power of the native majority. This may be partly because this would require a lens operating on a macro scale, rather than a micro one. To be sure, writings on super-diversity have hardly ignored mainstream institutions. In fact, since one of the goals of the super-diversity concept in its original formulation by Vertovec is to offer guidance to social service practitioners, the mainstream or dominant societal institutions that interact with immigrants have come within the concept’s field of vision. But the emphasis is on the need for these institutions to adapt to the new super-diverse condition rather than the power they exert in shaping the experiences of immigrants and their children.

For some observers, the diversification of diversity and existence of no-majority cities puts into question the very existence of a societal “mainstream” (Crul 2016). Alba and Duyvendak, however, argue that in many diverse settings long-dominant groups continue to define the social and cultural mainstream even after they have ceased to be the demographic majority. These groups may – or can at least try to – set the rules for culturally accepted behaviour, and their mainstream status can even become a political resource or a way to legitimize their superior position. Political structure also plays a role. Legal status and the structure of political institutions may effectively exclude many newcomers from meaningful political and civic participation (Waters and Kasinitz 2015), thereby contributing to the mainstream minority’s ability to exercise power over a diverse majority.

Taking macro-processes into consideration highlights that in countries of Western Europe such as the Netherlands members of the long-established native population have been drawing sharper immigrant/native boundaries in recent years than before. Culturalized and homogenized versions of citizenship have become hegemonic in the Netherlands over the past decade(s), as they have in many West European countries. Quite surprisingly, these new ethnic hierarchies and sensitivities – which can have a huge impact on social relations at the micro-level, as the articles by Wekker and Mepschen show – have not been taken into account by most scholars studying super-diversity. This may help to explain why super-diversity is often conceptualized as a form of rather peaceful co-existence. Incorporating the vertical dimension of the mainstream or dominant native population, as Alba and Duyvendak’s article (this issue) suggests, would enrich the analytical power of the super-diversity concept. Indeed, as they also argue, assimilation and super-diversity are not mutually exclusive. Assimilation actually produces heterogeneity and diversification, if only because national origin groups become increasingly diversified over time as immigrants and their children adapt to dominant norms, values, and practices in different ways and rates and have different experiences of mobility. These processes of acculturation and assimilation may intensify the experiences of super-diversity for both migrants and natives.

This leads to another area for further reflection and study, what we might call adding more diversity to super-diversity research. Despite the stress on many types of diversity and difference inherent in the notion of super-diversity as laid out by Vertovec, the empirical literature using the concept remains overwhelmingly focused on one type of difference, namely ethnic differences (for a promising exception see Wessendorf 2014). The call to move beyond the ethno-focal lens has the potential to widen possibilities for individuals with migrant backgrounds to be acknowledged as human beings with a plurality of affiliations – and could encourage policymakers, service providers and scholars to recognize that members of “migrant communities, just like the settled population, can ‘cohere’ to different social worlds and communities simultaneously” (Zetter et al. cited in Vertovec 2007, 1049). Still, because much of the rapidly growing literature that uses the term super-diversity has yet to significantly move beyond an ethno-racial lens, the theoretical promise of Vertovec’s formulation often goes unfulfilled, as do some important implications for public policy (see Hall 2017 on connecting super-diversity to migration border issues).

Just how various bases of diversity intersect in different super-diverse contexts also requires analysis. This includes understanding the conditions under which particular differences – race and class, to mention two critical ones – acquire more significance in some locations, institutions, and situations than others, and may produce or reproduce exclusionary forms of inequality and power imbalances. The articles in this issue grapple with many of these topics as they expand our appreciation of how super-diversity operates in every-day life and as they point to questions that call for further research, elaboration, and development on both sides of the Atlantic. The super-diversity concept has already stimulated new ways of thinking in the scholarly literature about changed realities, especially in Western Europe, and the articles in this issue can, we believe, help to advance us further in this endeavour.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.