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Significant progress has been made in recent years in multiplexing techniques for in-fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors. This paper is intended to give a systematic overview of recent progress in the multiplexing techniques, including wavelength-division-multiplexing, spatial- division-multiplexing, time-division-multiplexing, and their combinations. There is no doubt that these multiplexing techniques will play an important role in the FBG sensor technology as they make FBG sensor systems cost-effective for quasi-distributed measurement.

Since 2001, as the social and spatial compositions of multiculture and migration have become more complicated and diverse, geography has moved back to the centre of policy, political and academic arguments about cultural difference and ethnic diversity in England. This spatial turn is most obvious in preoccupations with notions of increasing ethnic segregation but it is also apparent in discussions of the possibility of everyday multicultural exchanges in relationally understood places. Responding to the work of others on these questions and in these places, and informed by data from research exploring Ghanaian and Somali migrant settlement in Milton Keynes this paper reviews some of the quantitative and qualitative evidence being drawn on in academic, policy and political debates about contemporary multiculture. The paper problematises the dominance of the concept of segregation in these debates and examines the value of the concept of conviviality for understanding the ‘in-development’ ways in which multiculture is lived.

This article contributes to understandings of the conviviality which has dominated recentsociological approaches to urban multiculture. The article argues for conviviality’s conceptual extension by reference to recent rethinking of community as a profound sociality of ‘being with’ and a culture of urban practice. The article draws from a qualitative dataset examining sustained encounters of cultural difference and the relationships within social leisure organizations in three different English urban geographies. The article explores how the elective coming together of often ethnically diverse others, over time, in places, to do leisure ‘things’ meant these organizations could work as generative spaces of social interaction and shared practice through and in contexts of urban difference. The article concludes that putting conviviality as ‘connective interdependencies’ into dialogue with community as ‘being in common’ develops their sociological and explanatory power and counters the reductions and limitations that are associated with both concepts.

Discussions of ‘smart’ cities generally focus on the technologies that can be mobilised to make cities work better, to ensure services are delivered more effectively and to empower citizens in various ways. But another way of considering the smartness of cities is to focus on cities themselves as social organisms and to review how they work, particularly in finding ways of living with difference and generating innovation. This chapter considers these questions with the help of evidence drawn from research on the experience of multiculture as a lived experience in three different and distinctive English urban areas.

In this paper we reflect on the kind of listening that happens in research whilst taking part in a keep fit group and getting sweaty, that pushes us to ask an interviewee 'Are you alright?' and haunts us when the project is over. This is the kind of listening that weaves through, around and beyond what is immediately heard, including the unspoken, the articulateness of objects and the listening that comes through participating. The paper stems from a project concerned with how people live, experience and manage cultural diversity and ethnic difference in their everyday lives in urban England. Divided into two sections, the first part introduces our methods that included participant observation, interviews and repeat in-depth discussion group meetings. The second reflects on our experiences of listening whilst doing, explores feelings that mediate listening and considers the time involved in listening.

This paper engages with an emergent literature on multiculture and concepts such as conviviality and negotiation to explore how increasingly ethnically diverse population routinely share and mix in urban places and social spaces. As part of a wider ESRC funded, two-year qualitative study of changing social life and everyday multiculture in different geographical areas of contemporary England, this paper draws on participant observation data from three branches of franchised leisure and consumption café spaces. We pay particular attention to the ways these spaces work as settings of encounter and shared presence between groups often envisaged as separated by ethnic difference. Our findings suggest that corporate spaces which are more often dismissed as commercial, globalized spaces of soulless homogeneity can be locally inflected spaces whose cultural blandness may generate confident familiarity; ethnic mixity; mundane co-presence and inattentive forms of conviviality.

Situating itself in encounter and public space debates and borrowing from nonrepresentational theory approaches, this paper uses data from the authors’ 2-year Economic and Social Research Council research project to consider how local urban parks can work as sites of routine encounter, mixity, and place belonging. The paper explores how parks as green public spaces are not only important as sites of inclusive openness but that the materiality of parks is a key dynamic in affective encounter processes. Parks can work as animators of social interactions, participatory practices, and place affinities across ethnic and cultural difference. The paper concludes that the concept of convivial encounter can be extended to incorporate the concept of elective practices – choosing to be in shared public space can generate connective sensibilities that are not necessarily contingent on exchange. In using parks as a lens to examine localities and diversity, the paper critically reflects on research practices for understanding and describing heterogeneous formations of multiculture and argues that the project’s research design and the fieldwork methods present an attempt to carefully and appropriately respond to research with complexly different places and populations.

This paper contributes to research on urban multiculture and debates as to how people routinely live and experience ethnic diversity in their everyday lives. This research takes an ‘unpanicked’ approach to multiculture that sits differently to, although not unaffected by, multiculturalism as policy objective and those debates around multiculturalism that variously celebrate cultural difference or construct it through crisis talk. Critical to this paper are the routine phenomenologies of multiculture and the everyday practices, competencies and skills of young people attending college. Because of their diverse intakes and the openness of young people to difference, colleges are key sites within which urban multiculture is experienced and through which it is defined. Based on participant observation, repeat in-depth discussion groups and interviews, the focus of this paper is young adults attending post 16 colleges and schools in three ethnically diverse urban locations. Colleges and schools are urban spaces that mediate sociality and student experience but are also woven into the wider urban setting in which they are placed. The paper explores the skills and competencies that young adults develop to negotiate college and we particularly focus on their use of jokes and the exercise of restraint to get along with others.