Visualizing superdiversity and “seeing” urban socio-economic complexity

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.