Immigration and ethno-cultural "diversity" of European cities: conceptual and methodological insights

Abstract

Diversity has been recently found at the forefront of conceptual and policy approaches to the city in the contemporary urban context. The term embraces overall ethno-cultural, religious, linguistic, gender, class, lifestyle and any other diversification of urban dwellers in North America and Europe. The article attempts the archeology of the use of the term "diversity" in urban studies and migration studies. It also examines the validity of the claim that, today, diversity is the most important ever. The way we perceive the diversity of the urban populations depends on the temporal and historical context in which any comparisons take place. Short-term comparisons, which generally prevail in research on diversity, result in a sense of “explosion” of diversity in cities nowadays, as claimed by an important body of scholarly work. The article critically reviews besides the mainstream assumption that global migration has intensified over the last decades, upon which is built the idea of the extraordinary increase of ethno-cultural diversity in European cities. Recent research in the field of international migration challenges the idea of an increasing diversification of migrants globally. Which, in turn, undermines the assumption that migration-related diversity in the cities of Europe is on increase.