There is a parable called the “The Blind Men and the Elephant”. Its origin is assumed to be in South Asia in the first millennium B.C. This parable can be found in Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu and Jain texts. It tells the story of a group of blind men who try to describe an elephant; however, because each of them just touches and, thus, describes only one part of the elephant, they end up fighting about what an elephant is. In the different versions of the parable, the number of blind men examining the elephant varies as do the body parts of the elephant examined by the men and the extent of the violence with which the subsequent discussion takes place and the way in which (or whether) the conflict between the men is resolved. The morale of the parable, however, is shared by all versions: The truth of a matter can only be grasped in its partial aspects. These aspects, in turn, depend on how a matter is approached. Only by compiling all possible partial aspects is it possible to take a look at the whole.
When I started my research on migration-driven diversity in cities, I often felt like one of the blind men. At times, I even felt like several of the blind men at the same time. My interest has been to investigate how changes and diversification brought about by migration processes and how people deal with these changes.1 My aim was to understand how the emerging diversification through immigration and emigration by different actors is responded to in order to deal with this new diversity.2 Already, at the beginning of my research, the question was what kind of (migration-driven) diversity I was interested in: Was it the ethnic composition that had changed as a result of immigration and emigration processes that I was looking at in the city districts? Should I look at the religious landscape, which was partly differentiated and partly shifted? Were demographic factors worth analysing in relation to the topics of work, housing and school? I would like to illustrate this struggle with a short example from my research: I met a group of retired allotment gardeners to talk with them about their perception of the district they live in and about how it has changed over the past few decades (Interview: Allotment Gardeners, 4 May 2010). In the course of our conversation, Ina Becker [pseud.]3—one of the participants—mentioned that she could no longer talk to anyone today, because only a few of her neighbours in the immediate vicinity still spoke German. For her, the contact with her environment, the short conversations in passing or in case of unintentional encounters in the hallway was a matter of course for a long time. The immigration of people from abroad and the moving away of long-time residents from the district have changed Ina Becker’s environment. The diversity of languages in the district is increasing. An increase in diversity through migration is described by Ina Becker as a loss of communication and neighbourliness. The topic of language as one of perhaps the most obvious aspects related to migration processes (cf. Tracy 2017) is something I have encountered again and again in the context of my research. However, language differences are not always described as a loss. Regarding schools, language differences are not mentioned to me as a loss in personal communication but in connection with educational participation and social advancement; language support for the children of immigrants is often especially discussed in these conversations. Outside school, linguistic differences are addressed as questions of a self-determined life—be it while shopping, visiting a doctor or interacting with public authorities. Linguistic differences and linguistic diversity are cultivated and promoted at the same time. This is expressed in language courses for subsequent generations of immigrants and in native-speaking groups within religious communities. Last but not least, I have also encountered linguistic diversity as a benefit, for example, when it comes to travelling, where native speakers can act as mediators between different language groups. Each of these different descriptions gave me the feeling of touching the elephant at a different place. This feeling intensified when I looked at other aspects, such as religion, nationality or skin colour. Thus, diversity meant something completely different when I dealt with the integration of the children of immigrants into the school than when I asked about the emergence of migrant economies in neighbourhood. Once again, diversity was represented differently in the ways of dealing with it: offering language course had another intentional object than organising an international street festival, although both considered (migration-driven) diversity their intentional object. The concept of diversity makes it possible to address all these aspects (in their interactions and overlaps). That is one of its merits (Vertovec 2015). However, a concept that can be everything loses its explanatory power. My intention was to gain a broader view on the elephant instead of adding more body parts to it. That was the moment when I decided to make the concept of diversity a theme in its own right and my focus of research. The present book is the result of this examination.
In the following, I introduce the concept of situational diversity. I define situational diversity as social differentiations enacted in reoccurring similar conditions of the social. The concept aims to understand the complexity and contingency of social differentiation by asking how diversity in urban neighbourhoods occurs as a result of locally, socially and temporally specific practices. With the focus on situations, I pursue the goal of providing a framework to examine the temporally and spatially localised conditions of the contingent and emergent nature of social differentiations, while simultaneously avoiding overestimating contingency. Moreover, the concept offers the possibility of decentring diversity and asking for its temporal and spatial variations. With situational diversity, I hope to provide a new perspective for diversity studies by means of adding a twist to established dimensions of diversity, such as gender, ethnicity and disability, and offering new non-essentialising modes and processes of differentiation. I call these modes and processes situational modes of differentiation . I apply the concept of situational diversity by means of an analysis of migration-driven diversification in two neighbourhoods: Nordbahnhofviertel in Stuttgart (Germany) and Pollokshields in Glasgow (United Kingdom). I am going to demonstrate the concept by analysing situations of negotiation, regulation and government of migration-driven diversity in the two neighbourhoods and by presenting four situational modes of differentiation: infrastructural demand, habitual places, environmental resourcefulness and environmental ability.
The origins of this book date back to 2007. At that time, I got to know Nordbahnhofviertel, one of the two field sites, as part of a study project. In a first examination of the district, I was concerned with practices of living in a district marked by migration, during which I came across a wide variety of ways of dealing with the diversity arising from immigration and emigration processes (Klückmann 2013a, 2013b). The starting point for this study was to take a closer look at these processes. The survey period ran from 2012 to 2015, and I added the Pollokshields district in Glasgow as a further field of research as a means of contrast. I am deliberately talking about contrast here, not comparison. A comparison, in the strict sense of the word, would go hand in hand with the control of a wide variety of variables and parameters.4 Control in this sense, in my understanding, is not possible in field sites such as cities. Moreover, such a procedure would not do justice to the complexities of cities and their districts. However, I am convinced that locality plays a significant role in dealing with diversity and, therefore, it was imperative to consider another neighbourhood.5 Nevertheless, when selecting the second district, attention was paid to the similarity of certain parameters, for example, that the numerically relevant immigration took place after the Second World War and that it was predominantly Muslim. In addition, the selection considered the fact that it should not be a capital city and that the cities are approximately comparable in size. In addition, the practical commuting of research between Glasgow and Stuttgart also corresponded to the sustained contrast stimulated by the Grounded Theory method (Strauss and Corbin 1996). According to Strauss and Corbin, it is only through the changing view of different fields that the condensation of knowledge is possible. Therefore, I moved between Glasgow and Stuttgart, between archives and conversations, between participating in events and reading scientific studies. This resulted repeatedly in shifts of perspective, new questions and the inclusion of other sources. With the aim of developing a perspective on the phenomenon of migration-driven diversity, the districts serve as case studies. However, many of the examples considered from the urban districts are not new phenomena related to migration processes. The new, in the sense of the essence of scientific work, corresponds here to the new perspective developed on a (known) phenomenon. The districts in their representation, therefore, correspond consciously more to a panorama. Why did I choose the city for the research on diversity? Cities have always been regarded as places of diversity—places where the most diverse people and strangers meet (cf., e.g. Hannerz 1980; Lindner 2004; Simmel 1995). Regarding this characteristic, cities as well have been places of research on migration, on processes of immigration and emigration, and on the associated changes.6 The United Nations predicts that by 2050, about 70 per cent of the world’s population will live in cities. A decisive factor in this development are processes of migration (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division 2017b): processes of internal migration, for example, rural-urban migration, and processes of international, transnational immigration. However, cities are affected differently by these processes, with individual cities emerging as centres and nodes of particular attraction (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division 2017a). Consequently, the city or, more specifically, the district was chosen as the field of investigation for this study. Cities and their districts are a concrete formation of the social. How both the city as a whole and a district can be understood, and how processes of diversification and ways of dealing with these changes can be depicted, will be discussed in the next chapter. Vertovec identifies two res...
