The tale of two cities: Diversity in Leeds and Warsaw

Communities across the world are becoming more diverse because of international migration, population ageing, residential mobility and life style choices. These processes result in communities differing in their diversity. In a European Research Council (ERC) project called Living with Difference, we seek to understand how people respond to living with others who are different from themselves. To provide a context for a survey and in-depth interviews, we prepared a description of residential community diversity in two cities, Leeds and Warsaw, using census data (UK 2001, Poland 2002). We used selected variables to represent in both cities the key social dimensions of difference: demographic, socio-economic, ethnic and disability. A standard cluster analysis using a k-means algorithm was implemented for each city separately and for the two cities combined. The paper presents the arguments for cluster selection, maps the results at community scale (Community Areas in Leeds, Urban Regions in Warsaw) and graphs the clusters in four dimensions. Different diversity clusters are identified in each city and the combined analysis shows how communities in one city compare with those in the other. We will use the diversity clusters with other more up to date population information to stratify the survey and to situate the interviews in their community context. The paper illustrates the advantages of collaboration between quantitative and qualitative social scientists.