University of Helsinki
Tuomas Väisänen has defended his PhD “Diversity of places and people: Using big data to understand languages and activites across geographical space” successfully on Friday the 10th of November. His opponent was associate professor Grant McKenzie from McGill University, Canada. In case you missed the event and want to read the Lectio Praecursoria, you can find it below.
Väiski’s Lectio Praecursoria:
Cities are home to over half of the human population.
The number of people living in cities is increasing at an unprecedented scale due to accelerating growth of urbanization, international migration, and mobility. These global megatrends are further intensified by climate change and biodiversity loss.
Today, 56 % of the world’s population lives in cities. The United Nations estimates that by 2050, this percentage has increased to 70 %. This will place immense pressure on cities to provide housing, employment, and services for a growing number of inhabitants.
At the same time, the cities are not only becoming more populous, but the populations living in cities are becoming more diverse.
More people of increasingly varied cultural, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds are interacting in cities than ever before. Accordingly, researchers in the last 15 years have recognized that variables commonly used to describe population diversity in the past, such as countries of birth or origin, or ethnicities of the individuals, are not adequate for assessing the new patterns of diversity present in contemporary urban populations.
Recent research has thus called for characterizing urban populations as being “super-diverse.” That is, the populations are diverse across multiple variables at the same time, such as ethnicities and countries of origin, but also religions, languages, gender, age, socio-economic and immigration statuses.
As you might have observed from the title of my work, in my thesis I focus on exploring diversity from the perspectives of languages and activities.