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This chapter aims at providing insight into how social mixing plays out in the Transvaal neighborhood in Amsterdam — a neighborhood which has gone through various rounds of urban renewal — in the context of nationwide polarization between native-Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch.

This chapter is based on research with a neighborhood focus — daily interactions, urban renewal, and use of public space — which took place during 2007–2010. Methods used include participant observation, semistructured interviews, and focus groups.

The physical renewal implies renovating and pulling down social housing, and building new social or owner-occupier housing. This study provides insight into how residents of different ethnic and income backgrounds live together in the neighborhood, also taking into account the impact of social polarization at the national level.

By knowing how people with different ethnic and class backgrounds live together in Transvaal neighborhood, it contributes to the formulation of evidence-based policies for the improvement of social cohesion, livability, safety of the neighborhood, and social capital of local residents.

This study looks at social mix in the context of national-level social polarization between native-Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch. This creates a new viewpoint seen against how the general literature on renewal and social mixing tends to do two things: firstly it usually explicitly or implicitly is also a tenure mix strategy, and secondly the policy focus of the social mix is usually around class issues, that is, the mixing of poor social housing tenants with richer owners.

This chapter examines patterns of neighbouring in the small Essex town of ‘Eastside’, located in London’s eastern suburban periphery. Drawing on qualitative interviews, two groups of resident interviewees are discussed: established, long-term, white British residents who have lived in Eastside for many years, and ethnically diverse newcomers who have recently moved to the area. This chapter focuses on patterns of neighbouring – both positive in the form of ‘neighbourliness’ and negative in terms of ‘unneighbourliness’ – and considers whether neighbouring provided the basis for residents to develop a sense of community. Basic neighbouring activities, such as saying ‘hello’ and the mutual provision of support, were commonplace, although proactive intervention and socialising with neighbours were more limited. Only a minority of both long-term and incoming interviewees identified a sense of community based upon neighbouring. The dominant aspect of the former’s sense of community was a ‘narrative of decline’ in which they lamented the loss of the more intense neighbourliness that they recalled from the past. Unneighbourliness was also evident, for example, in relation to noise, and various reasons for this are analysed including deficiencies within the physical environment, tenure prejudice, and established/newcomer resident tensions.

Cities are continually built and unbuilt (Hommels, 2005), reflecting cycles of investment and disinvestment across space, the machinations of housing and urban policy interventions, and shifting patterns of household need, demand, choice and constraint. The drivers of change are fluid and reflect shifting political, institutional, technological, environmental and socio-economic contexts. Urban landscapes evolve in concert with these changes, but the built environment tends to be defined more in terms of spatial fixity and the path-dependency of physical fabric. Suburban neighbourhoods register this dynamism in different ways as they have flourished, declined and subsequently revalorised over time. Changes initiated through redevelopment, from large-scale public renewal to alterations and renovations by individual owner-occupiers, are long-standing signifiers of reinvestment (Montgomery, 1992; Munro & Leather, 2000; Whitehand & Carr, 2001). Our concern here relates to a particular form of incremental suburban renewal: the increasing significance of private ‘knockdown rebuild’ (KDR) activity. KDR refers to the wholesale demolition and replacement of single homes on individual lots. We are interested in the scale and manifestations of this under-researched process and, in particular, the new insights offered to debates regarding gentrification, residential mobility and choice, and in turn, potential implications for metropolitan housing and planning policy. Our focus is Sydney, Australia.

Contemporary urban change is predominantly driven by migration and capital accumulation, with associated urban (re-)development projects – such as new-build gentrification – typically favouring the middle classes. Low-income residents in gentrifying neighbourhoods are often said to be displaced from their homes, either directly or indirectly, or to experience a loss of sense of place induced by the physical and social changes to the area. With the latter in mind, we investigate the perceived opportunities and threats of urban renewal experienced by stay-put communities in the wake of new developments and demonstrate how a loss of sense of place occurs via conflict between neighbours affected by the change. Our focus on transnational spaces comprising co-migrant Kurdish/Turkish communities in the two cities of Istanbul (Turkey) and Vienna (Austria) reveals not only how profoundly the impacts of neighbour conflict are felt as once-close and supportive neighbourly ties are severed but also how well-established neighbourly norms and obligations in transnational spaces accentuate the conflict in the first place. Moral codes that require neighbours to look after one another, along with local power dynamics of support in return for loyalty, set expectations that neighbours will take each other’s side when needed. Our findings reveal that the situatedness of residents to the development projects (in terms of proximity, residential tenure and openness to change) causes neighbours to take opposing sides and that the conflicts generated are accentuated by the perceived failure of neighbours to meet their neighbourly obligations. The result is a loss of sense of place and belonging for all residents – not just those detrimentally impacted by the development – wrought by rising hostility and avoidance among neighbours, and an overall weakening of neighbourly ties.

The chapter deals with social inequalities in post-conflict and post-2007/2008 financial crisis Northern Ireland. From the late 1970s to the late 1990s, Northern Ireland was characterised by a Catholic/Protestant sectarian conflict and affected by marked political, economic and social discrepancies disadvantaging the Catholic minority.

The combined effects of the economic boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and of the signing of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, improved the social and economic living conditions of Northern Ireland citizens and diversified the ethnic composition of the population, as immigrants were attracted by new opportunities offered in the booming Northern Ireland labour market. The 2007/2008 financial crisis was to curb these positive trends, although Northern Ireland’s economy has now recovered as its unemployment rate indicates.

In the light of this specific context, this chapter first examines key indicators of social inequalities in Northern Ireland: wealth, employment and housing. It then focuses on traditional indicators of Catholic/Protestant inequalities: education employment and housing. It finally examines to what extent the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the 2006 St Andrew’s Agreement and the 2014 Stormont House Agreement have tackled the issue of social inequalities.

This chapter provides an account of the multi-dimensional injustices faced by public housing tenants in inner-city Salford; a contemporary, post-crash ‘austerity’ British city.

Two phases of qualitative empirical fieldwork were conducted by the author between 2003 and 2016 supplemented by documentary research and analysis of media articles released since 2009.

The empirical data presented demonstrates the challenges of living in partially gentrified, partially abandoned, semi-ensnared spaces. Salford is a city where ‘austerity’ has hit hard; where household incomes, social services and public housing tenancies have been undermined to such an extent that many live in extremely uncertain conditions. This has occurred against the backbeat of longer term restructuring where the state has been rolled back, out and back again at a bewildering rate, shunting residents from one logic of renewal and retrenchment to another.

This chapter looks beyond what can seem like linear accounts of restructuring within ‘planetary’ accounts of neoliberal urban transformation and recognizes the chaos of urban renewal and welfare state retrenchment in the global Northern urban periphery. In so doing, it argues we have a better platform for understanding the nuances of residents’ responses, resistances and relations on the ever-shifting ground.