Motley (adjective) :  made up of many different people or things

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/motley

Colsen Whitehead, “City Limits,” from The Colossus of New York, page 2

” This place multiplies when you’re not looking. We move over here, we move over there. Over a lifetime, that adds up to a lot of neighborhoods, the motley construction material of your jerry-built metropolis”

From reading this text, i knew that the word would be describing the type of construction but I would’ve never thought about being made up of a lot things. The word helps a lot better because originally I would’ve thought it would be old material not something that involves a lot, which makes understanding the text better in the sense of an overlapping New York