Diversity and urban economic growth

Across the world, increasing migratory flows of multiple sorts and directions are making cities ever more diverse and complex. Within this evolving urban context, population diversity manifests itself not only in a multiplicity of nationalities, citizenships and ethnicities but also in a diversity of cultures, traditions, languages, ages, genders, religions, sexual orientations, social classes and other forms of identity - a phenomenon that Vertovec (2007) refers to as the ‘diversification of diversity’ or ‘superdiversity’. Our focus here is upon migrant and ethnic population diversity, which has become an ever more significant characteristic of contemporary urban centres around the world and a defining feature in the emergence of a number of ‘superdiverse’ global cities such as London and New York (Sassen, 1991).

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