Which English-speaking city is most culturally diverse?

>>Of course I agree that London is a diverse city; all the cities mentioned in this thread are very diverse. However, it's going to be tough to convince me that the white population of London is as diverse as that of New York, Los Angeles or Toronto, where the ENTIRE white population is descended from immigrants.<<

Well, depends - at least here, it really doesn't matter what ethnicity you happen to be if you're white and you are beyond the first native-born generation here, a few exceptions aside (such as if one is something like Amish or Mennonite). Besides what food one's grandma might make (such as polish sausage in the case of my mom's mom), any outside influence is going to be that absorbed into the greater local culture rather than something that really correlates to one's own individual ancestry (such as German influence here in Milwaukee having become part of the general traditional culture of Milwaukee rather than something directly linked to whether one really has that much German ancestry).

>>Same here. In my family, the most recent arrivals were from England, four generations ago, but that side of my family is more typically 'Canadian' than the Black side of my family which has been in Canada for probably two hundred years and in North America longer than that. Cultural identity can't be resolved down to how long your family's been in the country.<<

Things here are generally on a far more recent timescale than that - my maternal grandmother *was* a native speaker of Polish (which she has since lost the ability to speak or read completely despite having been schooled in it) and had parents who were actually born in what had been Poland-Lithuania, and yet my mom doesn't know a word of Polish aside from maybe "kielbasa" (and has less cultural influence from Polish culture than I have had from German culture, despite being ethnically just Polish). The Poles, though, seem to have assimilated much quicker than the Germans here, as a degree of German identity is still retained here to date even though the Germans came here largely before the Poles...

Auckland is extremely diverse also.
15% asian
10% maori
10% pacific
9% other (SA, Australian, European recent immigrants)

Which English speaking city is the least diverse?

>>Which English speaking city is the least diverse?<<

The problem with that question is what do you define a "city" as in the US (as it does not have a formal definition like it has in some other countries). The reason why such is significant is because rural areas of the US (particularly in areas of the Midwest and West) are generally far less diverse than more urban areas, and there are plenty of towns in such rural areas which probably have very little diversity whatsoever.

To Travis: Let's take only cities with more than 1 million of inhabitants.

Even then, are you counting only particular cities proper, or are you counting their entire greater metropolitan areas? For instance, here in Milwaukee, the population of the city is 602,782 according to the 2006 US Census, and yet that of the Milwaukee–Racine–Waukesha area is 1,753,355 according to such (thank you Wikipedia). If you counted just the city proper, it would set it beneath the bar (despite being the city with the greatest population in Wisconsin), and yet, if you counted the entire metropolitan area, it would set it well above the bar. (And then, that would raise the question of just what one would base metropolitan areas upon - would you use, say, television Designated Market Areas?)

Let's count only cities with more than 1 million of inhabitants excluding the metropolitan area. The concept of metropolitan area would introduce too much confusion.

I guesss the Guest above has the population of the urban proper in mind, not including those living in the suburbs. Am I right, the dear Guest? You have my support there.

That is what I was trying to say , NIK.

I am also a bit surprised to know from the top thread of this page by Travis that there can be so little interaction and mixing among the different ethnic groups in the US (I personally don't think it a good thing). Would Travis tell us a bit more about the reasons behind?

No matter how diverse or otherwise your city may be just don't name any teddy bears Mohammed...or Muhammed .....or else you may find yourself in the jug. It seems that there is a difference in the spelling of this word depending on which side of the Atlantic you happen to be.

>>I am also a bit surprised to know from the top thread of this page by Travis that there can be so little interaction and mixing among the different ethnic groups in the US (I personally don't think it a good thing). Would Travis tell us a bit more about the reasons behind?<<

First it should be noted that such that does not apply to European Americans, Asian Americans, and American Indians, who are not sharply divided from each other (in particular, American Indian populations have often been diluted by intermarriage with European Americans and by part-American Indian children very often being raised as European Americans).

That aside, though, the matter is that the European American population is dominant in the US, and while other middle class people along with urban American Indians have largely assimilated with them, blacks and latinos have been largely marginalized and ghettoized within North American society and are generally significantly poorer than European Americans on average (even though there are definitely poor European Americans as well). There are some more affluent blacks and latinos, but they are few in number and are often more associated with European Americans than other blacks and latinos.

The reason for this is that blacks and latinos have by large been much less wealthy than whites to begin with in North American society and have already been marginalized even while having their own distinct cultures before they migrated to the cities of the Midwest, due to the consequences of slavery and continuing discrimination and marginalization after it on one hand and the nature of immigration from Latin America on the other. Furthermore, though, in areas like the Midwest they settled in the middle of large cities which were almost completely European American in nature beforehand, and the areas in which they settled were practically cleared of white people due to "white flight" in reaction to such, resulting in such populations being largely confined to ghettos in the inner cities of larger cities there and little actual interaction occurring between white, black, and latino populations. Furthermore, they were largely culturally isolated from the dominant European American population, whose own culture basically ignored them.

Other later events, such as the collapse of much of the manufacturing industries where said black people and like had jobs did not help, rendering many black areas severely economically depressed throughout the Midwest and rendering black populations even poorer than they were before. Furthermore, while European ethnic groups generally heavily intermarried with each other and largely lost their own individual identities, they remained separate from such, keeping their own cultures while simultaneously staying very marginalized. Consequently, while a more general European American culture developed they remained apart from it. As a result of all of this, what is present today is severe de facto residental segregation, sharp social divisions (including large cultural differences), and great differences in overall wealth and standards of living between the main social blocs in larger Midwestern cities while the white population has internally become more homogenized.

>> There are some more affluent blacks and latinos, but they are few in number and are often more associated with European Americans than other blacks and latinos. <<

Second- and third-generation Latinos in the US tend to have closed most of the educational gap with whites, and seem to be assimilating into the mainstream. (See, among others, David Card's paper: http://www.philadelphiafed.org/econ/conf/immigration/card.pdf). I don't have any data to back this up, but it seems plausible that the US was more ghettoized before World War I than it is today.

>> Well, from my own personal experience and auditory observation I'd go so far as to say that you'd most probably hear more different foreign languages being spoken on a single street in London than in any North American city! :-) Remember this - here in the UK we are far, far closer to a much wider range of different languages, dialects and cultures than anywhere on the North American continent. <<

Really! My experience has been exactly the opposite: even the East End wasn't quite as diverse as Toronto, New York, or Los Angeles. The statistics posted earlier seem to bear this out: my own city (San Jose, California) is around 47% white, compared to 71% of Londoners (60% are White British). The same seems to be true for linguistic diversity.

>>Second- and third-generation Latinos in the US tend to have closed most of the educational gap with whites, and seem to be assimilating into the mainstream. (See, among others, David Card's paper: http://www.philadelphiafed.org/econ/conf/immigration/card.pdf).<<

It depends. Such is almost certainly more true where you are, as it is in California, whereas I was talking primarily about the Midwest myself (and particularly about my own city, Milwaukee). Here in Milwaukee, Latinos are largely limited to what had been the old Polish neighborhood on the South Side (the Poles having since moved out and assimilated into the general white population), and are primarily lower class aside from the *occasional* middle class individual. I particularly remember a former coworker of mine from Mexico who commented on this after he came to Milwaukee, particularly that he was rather frustrated that almost the entire Latino population here was lower class (as he himself was middle class).

>>I don't have any data to back this up, but it seems plausible that the US was more ghettoized before World War I than it is today.<<

That almost certainly was true, but the thing back then is that there was not nearly the degree of assimilation amongst European Americans that one sees today; there were plenty of European ethnic neighboorhoods that simply do not exist anymore, many communities had been settled primarily by single ethnic groups which have since experienced internal immigration and emigration by members of other groups, and there has been a very large degree of intermarriage amongst European Americans of different ethnic groups since then.