The role of superdiverse home country cities in helping migrants negotiate life in superdiverse host country cities

Global cities and megacities are locales where (super)diversity is experienced in a condensed form. Their social textures are in permanent evolution; they are constructed, deconstructed, and reinvented by their constantly changing inhabitants. Cities constitute spaces where largely identical lifestyles, ‘modes of behaviour’, and ‘patterns of thought and feeling’ (Giddens and Sutton, 2013: 206-220) can be experienced. In the migration literature, superdiverse host country cities, primarily of the global North, are often investigated as destinations of migration, whilst the role of superdiverse home country cities, from which migrants arrive and which are often situated in the global South, is rarely considered. This paper draws on findings from a qualitative study on understandings of integration of highly educated Indian migrant women living in the UK, and mainly in London, who prior to moving to the UK had resided in socially, culturally and demographically highly diverse Indian or other cities. It is argued that pre-migration residence in superdiverse cities shapes the ability to negotiate superdiverse host city spaces. In particular, exposure to superdiverse social environments in India in everyday life and the need to deal with them greatly enhances the propensity for acquiring such mental states and pragmatic skills and approaches that can later be used, at least partially, in other superdiverse contexts.

© 2019. This author's accepted manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/