Ethnography, Diversity and Urban Space

Mette Louise Berg, Ben Gidley, Nando Sigona

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138795358
• eBook ISBN: 9781317635703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The chapters in this volume examine the racial and ethnic landscape of Britain in a contemporary era of neoliberalism and financial crisis. A key aspect of neoliberal thought is the belief that we live in a 'post-racial' in which the problems of racism and xenophobia have been overcome. However, cultural retrenchment and coded xenophobia have been sweeping the political terrain, accompanied by 'new racisms' and 'new racial subjects' that only close contextual analysis can unpick. The scholarship contained in this collection challenges those who suggest that we live in a post-racial time. By focusing on particular locations in Britain at a particular moment, the volume explores local stories of 'race' and racism across changing sociopolitical ground. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of race, racism, diaspora, multiculturalism, post-colonialism, transnationalism and post-race.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Ethnography, diversity and urban space

Mette Louise Berg and Nando Sigona

This article is an introduction to a special issue on ethnography, diversity and urban space. It places the ‘diversity turn’ within studies of migration and multiculture historically and discusses the implications of concepts such as ‘diversity’ and more recently ‘super-diversity’ for scholarship, policy and identity politics. It argues that diversity is a helpful concept for studies of migration and multiculture because it avoids the essentialism and bias towards ethnic affiliation often characterising studies within the multiculturalism framework, while being more grounded locally than studies within the transnationalism framework. It examines the methodological implications of increasing diversity and complexity on ethnographic studies and the definition of the ‘field’. It makes the point that increasing urban diversity poses a challenge to ethnographic ideals of ‘immersion’ and wholeness. Finally, it introduces the individual articles in the special issue.

The demise of multiculturalism as a public policy, and as a political discourse in several European countries, including Germany, the Netherlands and the UK, began over a decade ago in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in New York and the subsequent so-called war on terror. In October 2010, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that multiculturalism had ‘failed utterly’ and that it was in effect ‘dead’, placing the onus on immigrants to do more to integrate into German society; a few months later, in February 2011, the British PM David Cameron echoed Merkel’s attack on multiculturalism with calls for a ‘muscular liberalism’ against ‘passive tolerance’ (for critique, see Gilroy 2012).¹ The multiculturalism backlash (Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010b) that ensued effectively left European immigration countries that are de facto multicultural – in terms of languages spoken, religions practiced, ethnicity, etc. – without an explicit policy for dealing with this fact (see also Amin 2013).

Meanwhile, in scholarly discourse, ‘multiculturalism’ as an analytical concept has gradually faded away. Since the 1990s, scholars have questioned and problematised the boundaries and constructed nature of ethnic communities as units of analysis (Baumann 1996, Vertovec 1996, Alexander 2002, Brettell 2003, Glick Schiller et al. 2006), and the intrinsic risks and limitations of methodological ‘ethnicism’ (King 2001) and ‘racialism’ (Loveman 1999). In this critique, multiculturalism was seen as riddled with excessive groupism (Brubaker 2002), which tended to essentialise and reify differences between cultural or ethnic groups, while obscuring power differentials within (Baumann 1996).

Ironically, multiculturalism never was the monolith that its critics have painted it as; it was always contested and multivalent (Rose and Melville 2004, Vertovec 2007a, Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010a, Modood 2012). The critique of multiculturalism has given way to a broader expression and recognition of different kinds of differences, resulting largely from the waves of new migration that have transformed the demographic profile of urban areas, and increasingly also rural ones: what Steve Vertovec has termed ‘super-diversity’ (2007b). ‘Super-diversity’ is increasingly used where multiculturalism would have been used previously, but, as we discuss below, in sometimes contradictory ways.

Accordingly, depictions of bounded ethnic communities that fit successive multiculturalist policies have gradually been replaced by representations of society that emphasise fluidity, hybridity and cross-fertilisation (Hannerz 1987, 1992, Appadurai 1996, Werbner and Modood 1997, Papastergiadis 2000), an emphasis on migrant transnationalism (Rouse 1991, Glick Schiller et al. 1992, Levitt 2001) and critiques of methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002).

The shift has meant that ethnic identity politics and ethnic community-based mobilisation have had to find new channels and strategies of mobilisation. The title of a report by the London-based think tank Institute for Public Policy Research eloquently captures the transition from multicultural identity politics to ‘super-diversity’: ‘You can’t put me in a box’: super-diversity and the end of identity politics in Britain (Fanshawe and Sriskandarajah 2010).

Minimally, the diversity turn, and in particular the emergence of super-diversity in academic and policy discourse, recognises that previous ethnicity-based clustering, which had to some extent superseded race-based clustering, no longer provides an adequate analytical lens for understanding the complexity and dynamism of urban multiculture. The shift from studies of group X in place Y, to studies of localised forms of diversity – such as those included in this collection – enables scholars to acknowledge a wider range of differences and similarities between and within groups than conceptual predecessors such as ethnicity and race did. As summed up by Karen Fog Olwig in her epilogue to the special issue, the turn to diversity has entailed a change from focusing on entities, to focusing on relations. It also enables scholars to be alert to the spatial dimensions of the politics of difference. In effect, within studies of migration, ‘diversity’ holds the potential to do what ‘intersectionality’ has done within feminist scholarship, that is, conceptualising the interrelationships between gender, class, ‘race’ and other social divisions (Yuval-Davis 2006).²

This special issue brings together seven ethnographic articles and an epilogue that use ‘diversity’ to gauge and examine processes of everyday intercultural encounters and practices across European countries, from capital cities to small provincial towns and suburbs. Focusing on diversity related to processes of migration, rather than, e.g., sexuality, ability or faith, the articles are concerned with the politics and poetics of belonging, and how they relate to social and spatial practices of inclusion and exclusion. However, unlike studies based within a multiculturalist framework, they consider not just cultural differences, but also class-based differences (see especially Ben Gidley, Lars Meier, Ben Rogaly and Kaveri Qureshi, Susanne Wessendorf), housing trajectories (Gidley, Ole Jensen, Meier), and lifestyle and consumption practices (Meier, Rogaly and Qureshi, Wessendorf). They analyse practices of the majority, ‘white’ population as well as of minority or migrant groups, thus unsettling established categories of difference (Gidley, Jensen, Rogaly and Qureshi, Wessendorf). The articles are attuned to both the micro-level of everyday encounters in streets, housing estates, markets and neighbourhoods, but also to transnational connections and belonging (see especially Gidley, Rhys-Taylor, Camille Schmoll and Giovanni Semi).

The combination of detailed ethnographic studies of local-level dynamics and processes of belonging with a transnational sensibility sets these articles apart from important earlier neighbourhood studies, such as, e.g., Gerd Baumann’s study of the London suburb of Southall (1996) or Sandra Wallman’s study of two London neighbourhoods (1982).

Even if multiculturalism has been proclaimed dead, the legacy of previous discourses and systems of classification persists in the present. Similarly, there is clear evidence of continued racial and ethnic inequalities, and of racism, which suggest that we cannot entirely do away with these categorisations. They are still immensely powerful as systems of classification (e.g., in the UK national census) and are arguably essential for any quantitative, and especially longitudinal, analysis of inequality or integration.

Furthermore, multiculture, in the form of conviviality, mundane interactions and modes of negotiating ethnic and cultural difference, persists in everyday life (Gilroy 2004, Valentine 2008, Wise and Velayutham 2009). Changing public policies and discourses may affect practices of everyday interactions, but ‘multicultural drift’ (Hall 1999), that is, the visible presence of immigrants and ethnic minorities in all aspects of social life as an ordinary and inevitable part of the social landscape, is here to stay. This is true for the inner cities of European capitals (see Gidley, Rhys-Taylor and Wessendorf, this volume) but increasingly also for suburbs and provincial cities (Watson and Saha 2012; see also Jensen, Meier, Rogaly and Qureshi, and Schmoll and Semi, this volume). As the novelist Zadie Smith observes, multiculture is in any case not about how things should be:

We don’t walk around our neighbourhood thinking how’s this experiment going? This is not how people live. It’s just a fact, a fact of life.³

As Smith makes clear, multicultural drift happens at the local level, in neighbourhoods. Indeed, there has been a return to neighbourhood studies and increasing attention to questions of scales of belonging. The articles collected here suggest that the very local level is more important than the national level for understanding questions of belonging and expressions of diversity.

A key question arising from the rise of ‘diversity’ is what it does, which older concepts did not do, analytically, politically and discursively, and how different it really is from its predecessors. We have identified three distinct, yet inter-related dimensions of diversity, namely: (1) diversity as narrative, by which we refer to public narratives in which ‘diversity’ is celebrated as a marketable good; (2) diversity as social fact, by which we refer to areas characterised by a population comprising multiple ethnicities and countries of origin as well as other intersecting variables; and (3) diversity as policy, by which we refer to policies aimed at managing integration and fostering social cohesion (which may be variously named). The three dimensions of diversity are inter-related and overlapping; they also have both temporal and spatial implications, which a social scientific engagement with diversity needs to grapple with (see also Amin 2002, Valentine 2008, Alexander 2011). Equally, there is a methodological challenge of how to conceive, investigate and represent diversity in its different dimensions and expressions.

This special issue explores how diversity, in its various dimensions, is experienced locally, and what new forms of local belonging emerge in contexts where places are closely connected to so many non-proximate elsewhere, either through migration (evident in all articles in the volume), trade links (see especially Rhys-Taylor, and Schmoll and Semi), political activism (see Gidley) or in other ways, enabling unprecedented flows of information, images and money, as well as of affect, memory and longing. The articles are revised versions of papers originally presented at the ‘Ethnography, diversity and urban space’ conference held in Oxford in September 2011.⁴ When we, the editors (Berg, Gidley and Sigona), organised the conference, we had expected a wider geographical spread of papers. Given the resonances between scholarship on intersectionality and diversity as noted above, we were also surprised that gender and substantial conversations with feminist scholarship were relatively absent. It is our hope that the articles presented here will nonetheless inspire debate and future scholarship in which these shortcomings are addressed.

In the remainder of the Introduction, we address each of the three dimensions of diversity in turn. We then highlight some of the methodological challenges that a diversity turn entails, before outlining the special issue.

Diversity as narrative and counter-narrative

On 6 July 2005 London upstaged its chief rival, Paris, in the bidding to host the 2012 Olympic Games. The British team had put the pluralism and diversity of the British capital city at the forefront of its bid to the International Olympic Committee. This strategy signals an on-going re-articulation of cultural pluralism that sees ‘the skills, talents and ethnic backgrounds of men and women commodified, marketed, and billed as trade-enhancing’ (Abu-Laban and Gabriel 2002) in a globalised market where cities compete to attract financial capital and ‘the best and the brightest’ as the current London Mayor Boris Johnson has put it.⁵ Such public celebrations of diversity create a discursive terrain where bottom-up instances of diversity can be articulated and political claims made. At the same time, conflict and contestation may emerge as, for example, in the case of the EDL march in Peterborough in Rogaly and Qureshi’s article or, more tragically, in the case of the attacks that took place in London the day after the city was awarded the Olympic Games (Falcous and Silk 2010).⁶ The bombings can be seen as an attack on the ‘common-place diversity’ described in Wessendorf’s article, as belying the portrait of multicultural harmony, which the then Labour government projected both locally and internationally. Nostalgic narratives of past harmony and homogeneity set against present diversity...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Illustrations
• 1. Ethnography, diversity and urban space
• 2. Landscapes of belonging, portraits of life: researching everyday multiculture in an inner city estate
• 3. Shadow circuits: urban spaces and mobilities across the Mediterranean
• 4. The essences of multiculture: a sensory exploration of an inner-city street market
• 5. Commonplace diversity and the ‘ethos of mixing’: perceptions of difference in a London neighbourhood
• 6. Diversity, urban space and the right to the provincial city
• 7. Your ghetto, my comfort zone: a life-story analysis of inter-generational housing outcomes and residential geographies in urban south-east England
• 8. Everyone knew everyone: diversity, community memory and a new established–outsider figuration
• 9. Notions and practices of difference: an epilogue on the ethnography of diversity
• Index