Superdiversity’s backstory

In “Superdiversity: Migration and social complexity”, Vertovec returns to the
concept of superdiversity and reviews its uses in different disciplinary fields.
Importantly, the book also offers a useful backstory to the concept which
helps to better locate it into a long standing but not mainstream
anthropological engagement with social complexity. While triggered by a
new age of migration and the socio-demographic transformations it was
producing in London, the concept was also since inception a way of
capturing the diversification of world views and systems of categorisation
brought by these processes. However, drawing from research I carried out
with EU migrants in London after Brexit, I argue that profound movements
and transformations are occurring under the surface of a city that remains
“superdiverse”; changes driven by forces that fall outside the analytical reach
of “superdiversity”, leaving the question: what drives migration-driven
diversification unanswered.