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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.

The polarisation of employment is a specific structural change in the labour market when the share of high and low-skilled workers increases and, simultaneously, the share of middle-skilled workers decreases. The chapter analyses the effect of polarisation in Czechia and other Central European countries and describes how employment has changed from the perspective of skills regarding gender. The analysis is based on observing the changes in the share of high, middle and low-skilled workers evaluated on the basis of occupational classification over time. Results imply (with a few exceptions) polarisation of employment across all countries during the period between 1998 and 2021, even if we consider the distinction between males and females. Results confirm that employment polarisation has also become a prevalent phenomenon in Central European countries during the last two decades. Finally, this chapter also summarises the economic motivation for studying polarisation phenomenon.

The international literature on the impacts of globalization on large cities has insistently pointed to the increase in residential segregation. Three mechanisms have been identified as the causes of this phenomenon: globalization, which by disseminating neoliberal ideas throughout the world, generated changes in the regulatory models and paradigms that guide urban policy; institutional reforms toward market liberalization and the property and housing market were undertaken in various countries; real estate prices became the central mechanism for distributing the population throughout the city, reinforcing income inequality as the determinant of urban spatial organization. At the same time, privatization exacerbated the growing inequality of access to the services and infrastructure that ensure urban well-being, especially with regard to quality. The wealthier areas, where those with greater purchasing power concentrate, have at their disposal an abundant supply of goods and services, whereas the areas populated by the poor are supplied with inferior goods and services. Further, globalization caused structural changes originating in the transformation of the productive base of the cities, creating trends toward social polarization. The social structure of the great metropolises is no longer represented by a pyramid, and is expressed instead by an hourglass where the middle positions narrow while the extremities widen. Simultaneously, there has been an increase in the distance between the average incomes of the higher and lower strata.

The marginalisation of council housing in Britain since the Housing Act of 1980 threatens to obscure some of the very valuable lessons to be learned from almost a century of mass public housing provision. This chapter demonstrates that despite considerable economic problems, and in the face of social change since 1980, a relatively poor council estate remained a site of social capital, and that women were particularly prominent in working with local agencies to solve problems.