The city as a space of multiplicity
The diversification of inequalities and hierarchies

Transnational and local comparisons and the status trajectories of newcomers who selectively move through layered and intersecting status hierarchies of origin, race, class, gender, and religion become compressed in the heterogeneous social lives of cities and their inhabitants. The project addresses
three interconnected dimensions:

1. It explores the emergence of new urban infrastructures upon the arrival of migrant newcomers (Heil 2018, 2020 accepted). Diverse migrant-specific, social and material infrastructural components become intertwined with each other. Migrant newcomers also interweave themselves and their collective resources with infrastructure components that pre-exist within a given urban fabric. Such complex infrastructuring practices become constitutive of new urban realities.
   
2. The project reveals the social practices of reflection, evaluation, imagination, and sensing that produce meaning from historically grown but changing contemporary configurations of valued difference as they happen upon the arrival of newcomers to a city. They mobilise well-known categories of an intersectional analysis—mainly, but not exclusively, race, class, gender, and religion—while at the same time questioning discourses of marginality (e.g., Heil 2020, 2019). Making otherwise hidden urban experiences intelligible adds analytical depth and detail to the theoretical thought on the urban. It challenges the power of homogenizing and simplifying narratives of urban stratification and inequality that a city like Rio de Janeiro predominantly produces (Heil under review).
   
3. The project significantly contributes to developing my analytical thought on conviviality as minimal sociality (Heil 2020). The empirical insights into how people live together despite seemingly unbridgeable differences (e.g., Heil 2019, 2019, 2020) inspires the conceptional provocation of convivial disintegration (Heil/Meissner 2020) that challenges the hegemonic location of integration in European thinking on the arrival of migrants.