Item

Abstract

Recent migration has made traditional destination cities so diverse
that many conventional social science concepts and methods have
become inadequate to the task of understanding complex diversity,
or what is now often termed superdiversity. Here, we address the
need for new methods of "seeing" urban superdiversity in two
ways. First, we highlight the need to understand urban contexts
by examining new combinations and intersections of multiple
social variables. Second, we demonstrate a suite of new
interactive tools. We attempt to enable users to picture, perceive
and apprehend complex analyses of multidimensional data on
urban diversity in new, more intuitive ways. This visualization
draws on multivariate geo-spatial data on different kinds of
diversity, across three major destination cities: Sydney, Vancouver,
and Auckland. We believe this approach contributes to the
theoretical and methodological refinements needed to study
contemporary superdiversity in urban settings, and to contribute
to better public understanding and policies regarding the
processes of urban diversification