Slow Motion Streets: Exploring Everyday Super-diversity in a London Neighbourhood through Video Rhythmanalysis

This chapter develops Lefebvre’s concept of rhythmanalysis to investigate the ways super-diversity comes to life in the everyday city through the intersection of the spatial and temporal. The chapter explores the multicultural intimacies of streets in a London neighbourhood through a close ethnographic focus on rhythms and atmospheres using slow-motion video. The research contributes to an emerging field of visual ethnographic scholarship by presenting slow-motion video as a method to explore the ‘presence’ (Lefebvre, 2004) of super-diversity and conviviality on the street.

I argue that in slowing down the encounters of the street, slow-motion video shows the often overlooked sensible and affective elements of super-diverse urban space, the mundane interactions between bodies, materials and technologies that create a form of ‘convivial affect’. I argue that these everyday encounters are shaped by a situated politics of difference and yet are also mediated by wider rhythms and atmospheres, contributing to a sense of ‘social time’. I draw attention to both the human and non-human elements of the streets. These material and technological elements can uncover the wider discourses and circulatory regimes of atmospheres in urban super-diverse neighbourhoods, focussing on their relation to broader flows of capital, forms of postcolonial culture and translocality.

This research has implications for how we understand super-diversity and its manifestations in urban space. It encourages policymakers and academics to recognise the affective human and non-human encounters that are a crucial aspect of conviviality, the everyday ways we live together with difference.