(Re-)negotiating the process of staying in superdiverse places

ABSTRACT

Little attention has been focused on how the differing features of ‘superdiverse’ neighbourhoods shape the demographic process of ‘staying’. Through drawing on research conducted in two different superdiverse neighbourhoods in the city of Birmingham, UK, the paper highlights how ‘staying’ is an inherent feature of superdiverse neighbourhoods and which is actively practised by migrants and non-migrants alike. Empirically, the paper identifies how staying is informed by a number of features associated with superdiverse neighbourhoods, such as local infrastructure and visible population diversity, as well as relational proximity to other areas (of the city), including the significance of city centre spaces and their role as multicultural spaces of adaptation. Conceptually, the paper informs recent work on ‘arrival infrastructures’ and ‘differentiated embedding’ for migrant (and non-migrant) settlement and provides new insights into the territorial, relational and temporal aspects of staying. This includes the importance of neighbourhood histories in staying processes, and which hitherto have been relatively neglected.

KEYWORDS:

• Superdiverse neighbourhoods
• staying
• diversity
• relational

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the support of the three community researchers who contributed to the delivery of this research project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Leverhulme Trust: [grant number RF2015-418].