Migrant Friendships in a Super-Diverse City

In sum, this book explores post-Soviet Russian-speaking migration to London, which is a novel, valuable, yet underexplored field. It considers the social and spatial connections active in global migration, and seeks to address migrants’ informal relationships which are localised in London but have both local and spatially distanciated origins. This book illuminates the construction of social ties and the dynamics which pervade those ties in practice, thereby enriching the understanding of urban sociality within the super‐diversity of London. The main ideas of this work stem from acknowledging the complexity of the ways in which contemporary migrants rely upon friendship in their decision making, practices of mobility and daily lives in a particular host society. This complexity cannot be fully grasped by theories of transnationalism, or accounts of ethnic communities. However, it is possible to get closer to understanding migrant social relationships through attending to the variety of close informal relationships in different locations as they exist between different subjects.