How do urban communities accommodate this century's massive transnational migrations? This volume seeks clues about how a city's capacity for urban social sustainability, termed "diversity capital," may expand under such conditions.

The author, Blair A. Ruble, examines three cities, now receiving large numbers of new immigrants, that have long histories of division into just two communities of language and race: Montreal, Washington, and Kyiv. "The growing presence of individuals who do not fit into long-standing group boundaries fundamentally alters the social, cultural, and political contours of traditionally bifurcated metropolitan regions," writes Ruble. "How does that presence change perceptions and institutions?"

Creating Diversity Capital approaches this topic in terms of how the new immigrants live, work, and go to school and describes how the politics in each of these cities has changed, or failed to change, in the face of the new demographics. A special feature is the use of important new information on Kyiv from a set of surveys conducted by the Kennan Institute in 2001-2

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Blair A. Ruble is director of the Kennan Institute and co-chair of the Comparative Urban Studies Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is the author, most recently, of Second Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka.


Comments on this book
"This book makes a strategic selection to demonstrate a singular hypothesis about the prospects that transnational migrations have the capacity to improve civic life in the years to come. The argument is fresh, thoroughly pursued, and convincing." --Howard Gillette, Rutgers University–Camden