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At a time when urban space is considered central to understanding how multicultural societies cohere, this paper examines how the urban and the nation are related. To do so, the paper focuses upon Birmingham, UK, which has been presented as a testing ground for national responses to difference and as a model for other European cities. Drawing on narratives of city boosterism, urban policy, local and national news articles, academic writing and resident accounts, the paper deals with three inter-related concerns. First, with discussions on how the city responds and adapts to national framings of diversity and its socio-political conditions of possibility, second, with claims that the city might be understood as epitomising the state of the nation and third, with questions concerning how Birmingham might actively work to shape, challenge or re-write understandings of the nation. Drawing on recent work urban experimentation, the paper asks what Birmingham's position as a laboratory for new social imaginaries and ways of belonging might mean, both for the city and its residents, and for national policy on cultural diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The population complexity associated with superdiversity brings a wide range of challenges for social welfare providers. Commentators have outlined concerns about the ability of service providers to meet the welfare needs of ever diversifying populations and point to potential problems in identifying the nature of need in rapidly changing superdiverse neighbourhoods as conventional approaches to consultation based around ethnicity become practically impossible. Using data collected in the West Midlands, which explored maternity service needs from the perspectives of new migrants and maternity professionals, some key barriers to effective welfare delivery in superdiverse areas are explored. The paper outlines the emergence of two challenges important in shaping new migrant access to maternity care in an era of superdiversity – novelty and newness – and proposes further research to examine the extent to which these challenges are faced in other social welfare services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the lived realities of ethnic pluralism, social marginalisation and activism in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham, UK, which external media representations have tended to depict as lacking 'community cohesion' and fostering 'parallel lives'. Drawing on qualitative interviews with local residents and entrepreneurs conducted over a three-year period, we challenge such representations and a defining characteristic of currently dominant integration discourses: their tendency to ascribe 'community cohesion' or its absence as absolute properties to localities. Contrary to such reifying classifications, our interview data reveal considerably more complex social realities defined by a series of ambivalences. The first ambivalence is between undeniable local conflicts and, simultaneously, the everyday 'conviviality' of boundary-crossings and inter-ethnic solidarities. Second, the local economy is shown to enable both cohesion and ethnic exclusion. Finally, local politics and religious practice also display contradictory tendencies towards boundary maintenance on the one hand, and new inclusive alliances on the other. The emerging picture of Alum Rock not only challenges rigid taxonomies implied by 'community cohesion' discourses but also poses important questions about inter- and intra-ethnic networks, religiously underpinned social capital, the locally 'embedded' market, perceptions of social change, and an ideologically heterogeneous local civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, Frank Webster sets out to "swim against the current" of some recent thinking on cities. In particular, he takes to task what he calls the "new urbanism" in which cities are seen as the new drivers and switching centres of an emerging economy which is largely deindustrialized, global and places a high premium on knowledge and information professionals. Webster goes on to test these ideas against Birmingham, the UK's second largest city, which has been keen to reap the assumed benefits of this new urban paradigm. Attempts to reinvent Birmingham are discussed such as the revamped historical canal system, the corporate leisure hub of Brindley place and through the city's internal cultural and ethnic diversity. However, Webster is less sanguine about attempts to transform Birmingham into a knowledge city because large swathes of the city's population play little or no role in the emerging new economy. He ends by questioning why there is such an air of inevitability about the new urbanism and why the "dull compulsion" of economics continues to exercise its dominant influence. In particular, he highlights the ways in which the vision from metropolitan elites of a brave new exonomy sidelines the experiences of many urban dwellers, especially the elderly for whom the new urbanism means little apart from a loss of community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]