Book review: Divercities: Understanding super-diversity in deprived and mixed neighbourhoods reviewed by Verónica Hendel

摘要: Cities and diversity have long been a matter of concern for Urban Studies. However, over the past decades, different researchers have shown that cities have become even more diverse. Terms such as ‘super-diversity’(Vertovec, 2007),‘conviviality’(Wessendorf, 2014) or ‘diversification of diversity’(Erel, 2011) aim to depict the increasing presence of migration that cities have experienced recently, especially as regards to countries of origin, ethnic groups, languages, religions, gender, age profiles and labour market experiences, and the multiplication of immigration legal statuses. Divercities: Understanding super-diversity in deprived and mixed neighbourhoods focuses on how urbanities from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, occupying diverse socio-economic positions, speaking different languages and with different legal statuses, can make life together in their city or neighbourhood.One of the main ideas of this compilation regards the fact that although the diversity approach is well equipped to bring attention to and explain the variety of differences along distinctive single categorisations, it is not that powerful in replacing concepts such as inequality and intersectionality that are more appropriate to explain how differences become inequalities. Divercities enriches the debate on living with social diversity by re-politicising it as it incorporates inequality and asymmetries in power relations.