Super-diverse Streets

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The ‘Super-diverse streets’ project was an ESRC-funded research exploration of the intersections between city streets, social diversity and economic adaptations in the context of accelerated migration (ref: ES/L009560/1). It was a comparative analysis of ‘super-diverse’ high streets that explored how urban retail economies and spaces are shaped by and shape migrant practices. Through the perspective of the multi-ethnic street, aspects of both economic and civic forms of organisation were explored. The project period spanned from 2015 to 2017, and focuses on five high streets within the UK’s most diverse cities, including: London, Leicester, Manchester, Birmingham and Bradford. The project focused on increasing migration into UK Cities over the past two decades, and extended to how urban concentrations of migrants locate, invest in and transform the economies and spaces of UK cities, in particular its urban high streets. This project engaged across processes of macro societal changes, combining migration and shifts in urban retail economies, through the transformation of micro worlds. The making of space, exchange, regulation and representation were at the project’s core.

The first phase of this project incorporated a qualitative survey conducted in 2015, on four ‘super-diverse’ high streets: Rookery Road (Birmingham); Stapleton Road (Bristol); Narborough Road (Leicester); and Cheetham Hill(Manchester). In total, the face-to-face surveys across four streets incorporate 910 units. This included 480 retail units and 351 proprietors were surveyed. This new data on ‘super-diverse streets’ provides insights into the micro-economies that provide important economic and civic resources across UK cities. These are streets that are located in ethnically diverse and comparatively deprived urban places, where urban retail spaces shape and are shaped by migrant investments.

The project built on Ordinary Streets, an earlier research project focusing on Peckham Rye Lane.

Project coordinator
Suzanne Hall

Researchers
Robin Finlay, Julia King

LSE Cities events

28 September 2017 | High Streets for All

21 January 2016 | Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai

22 October 2015 | New Urban Diversities: London perspectives

6 October 2015 | ‘Ordinary Streets’ film launch

21 September 2015 | Migrant streets: exploring radical visualisation

Conferences

4 July 2014 | Keynote: ‘Super-diverse Capital: Migration and city-making’, LSE Groups 2014: Identity and place research conference, 4 July 2014.

24 June 2014 | ‘Super-diverse Capital: Spatial networks in migrant cities’, IRIS conference on Superdiversity, University of Birmingham, 24 June 2014.

Public lectures

19 June 2014 | ‘Super-diverse Street: Towards a trans-ethnography’, MPI MMG Lecture Series, Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity, 19 June 2014.

29 Sep 2017 | New report reveals huge social value of London’s high streets

2 May 2017 | Suzanne Hall discusses migration and high streets in Royal Geographical Society podcast

18 Oct 2016 | Suzanne Hall contributes to Migration Matters post-Brexit series

5 Sep 2016 | Super-diverse streets research to be featured in BBC Brexit Special

23 Aug 2016 | Suzanne Hall to give keynote address at the 11th Annual Ethnography Symposium

2 Aug 2016 | LSE Cities research used in Channel 4 advert

16 Jun 2016 | Envisioning Migration: New article on Super-diverse Streets research

6 Apr 2016 | Suzanne Hall delivers migration paper in New York

8 Mar 2016 | LSE Cities research highlights role of migrant entrepreneurs

4 Feb 2016 | Media feature UK’s most diverse street

14 Dec 2015 | Super-diverse streets project Data Profiles | Ethnicity, economy and migration

15 Sep 2015 | LSE Cities Suzi Hall, Julia King and Robin Finlay give keynote lecture at The Sociological Review’s symposium