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There is a notable absence in contemporary rural studies--of both a theoretical and empirical nature--concerning the changing nature of rural local government. Despite the scale and significance of successive rounds of local government reorganisation in the UK, very little has been written on this topic from a rural perspective. Instead research on local political change has tended to concentrate on local governance and local partnerships--on the extra-governmental aspects of the governance system--rather than on local government itself. In contrast, this paper draws upon strategic-relational state theory to explore the changing structures and institutions of rural local government, and analyse how these can be related to the changing state strategies of those groups which are politically powerful in rural areas. In this respect, the paper draws on current and previous rounds of local government reorganisation to illustrate how new objects of governance, new state strategies and new hegemonic projects are emerging as a consequence of such restructuring processes. (Contains 3 figures.)

Little attention has been focused on how the differing features of 'superdiverse' neighbourhoods shape the demographic process of 'staying'. Through drawing on research conducted in two different superdiverse neighbourhoods in the city of Birmingham, UK, the paper highlights how 'staying' is an inherent feature of superdiverse neighbourhoods and which is actively practised by migrants and non-migrants alike. Empirically, the paper identifies how staying is informed by a number of features associated with superdiverse neighbourhoods, such as local infrastructure and visible population diversity, as well as relational proximity to other areas (of the city), including the significance of city centre spaces and their role as multicultural spaces of adaptation. Conceptually, the paper informs recent work on 'arrival infrastructures' and 'differentiated embedding' for migrant (and non-migrant) settlement and provides new insights into the territorial, relational and temporal aspects of staying. This includes the importance of neighbourhood histories in staying processes, and which hitherto have been relatively neglected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]