The new migration-driven dynamics in European cities are constitutive of ‘complex changes in the population characteristics surrounding patterns of nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, age, gender, class, and human capital’ (Vertovec 2015). In these complex urban landscapes of overlapping cultures and explicit distortion of the group-space-culture continuum, immigrants’ acculturation strategies might be subjected to a same sort of diversification (Berry 1997) involving different strategies and degrees of interculturality in the formation of ‘clusters of social communication’ (Deutsch 1953). The hybridisation of social relationships and cultural practices might have a transformative character in the way individuals rationalise their experiences in the domain of identity. Identities, necessarily dynamic and malleable as they involve identifications with changing realities, find expression not only through emotional, attitudinal and behavioural channels, but also through the political domain of meaning-ascription, visible when these changing realities are signified within particular discourses. Following studies linking socio-spatial interaction and identity formation, in this paper I explore differences among EU and non-EU migrants in incorporating inter-group relations and perceptions on cultural difference in notions and attitudes towards a united-in-diversity identity model. The data set I use has been generated through semi-structured interviews with immigrants from an EU and a non-EU background in North-Western European cities representing distinct diversity contexts.
