Lunch & Learn: Visualizing superdiversity in Canadian cities

This talk, by visiting Scholar of Excellence Dan Hiebert, will be especially of interest to scholars of migration, urban studies, geography, or who work with GIS modelling and geospatial data.

The concept of superdiversity was developed by Steven Vertovec, Max Planck Institute, to help us understand and come to terms with rapid cultural change (diversification), especially in urban centres that attract large numbers of migrants and immigrants from around the world. It highlights the point that new forms of diversity are being added to societies that are already characterized by older forms of diversity that also intersect with longstanding patterns and processes of inequality. Toronto, for instance, is an iconic example of these developments. 

For the past five years, Dan Hiebert, Professor Emeritus, UBC and visiting Scholar of Excellence at CERC Migration, has been working with Steve Vertovec to build methods to enable people to ‘see’ these changes through interactive data visualizations. Their work has produced websites focused on cities across the Pacific Rim, in Canada, and another iconic case, that of New York City. They are currently in the process of revising and reimagining their approach as new data become available, and in conjunction with emerging forms of inequality (e.g., vulnerability to Covid and increased heat-island effects related to global warming). 

In his presentation, Dan will briefly outline their starting point – the concept of superdiversity – and demonstrate how it is visualized for Canadian cities and then will close with a discussion on how the visualization tools could be further developed.