ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the utility and value of bringing together situated and placed everyday life with concepts of multiculture, conviviality, materialities, public space, social interaction and social practice. It offers the empirically informed argument that there is an urgent need to rethink first, the processes and nature of social connection between and across culturally different urban populations, and second, to rethink discourses of catastrophe through an emphasis on granular and differentiated understandings of social relationships characterised by increasing levels of diversity and complex affiliation. The spatial logics of working with/in Oadby, Milton Keynes and Hackney were located not in their topographies but in their multicultural topologies; apart, they each present a particular formation of suburban, new and super-diverse multiculture. In this topological context, shaped through spatial and temporal dynamics, cultural difference is both imagined and inhabited through 'some sense of placed-ness'.