Fenneke Wekker

Homing the Dutch

Abstract In this introduction, we show that whereas “home” in public discourses in the United States and many other Western countries is most often conceived of as a personal space, particularistic and exclusive, free from any external (state) interference, in the Netherlands, the metaphor of home as a public and ideological space is increasingly being used by policy-makers, urban planners, and social workers to legitimize their political programs, policies, and social interventions. They aim to make everyone feel at home in the nation, the city, and the neighborhood. This special issue Homing the Dutch: Politics and the Planning of Belonging deals in particular with the strong tendency in the Netherlands to govern and stimulate feelings of home and belonging in public space, building on an old tradition. The case studies that are being presented, all address instances of different (state-supported) projects or policies that attempt to improve social cohesion, integration, and livability by means of establishing “a feeling of home for everyone” in public space.

“We have to teach them diversity”: on demographic transformations and lived reality in an Amsterdam working-class neighbourhood

ABSTRACT This article aims to contribute to the ongoing debate on what the notion of super-diversity means in the practice of everyday life. Whereas the founder of the super-diversity concept, Steven Vertovec, primarily uses the term to point to specific demographic transformations, other scholars have deployed it in more ideological or theoretical terms. Based on ethnographic research in a working-class area of Amsterdam, this study analyses how and to what extent a new demographic super-diverse reality is lived on the ground. Whereas some studies show that super-diverse demographics can result in a super-diverse lived reality in which ethnic and racial diversity becomes the “new normal”, this article reveals a different situation. The findings of this study suggest that demographic transformations leading to increased migration-driven diversity can reinforce boundaries between groups of neighbourhood residents based on dominant class, racial and ethnic distinctions.

Community Building Practices

This empirical chapter focuses on community building practices that were deployed during the dinners at this particular restaurant. There appeared to be a complex range of practices, organized and unorganized, intended and unintended, foreseen and unforeseen, that gave shape to the construction and constitutive boundaries of the restaurant community and its several subcommunities. By distinguishing three types of practices, and drawing on theories regarding rituals, ceremonies, and social solidarity, this chapter shows to what extent and how community building practices evoke and reinforce modes of collective thinking, feeling, and acting and thereby create (immaterial) boundaries to outsiders.

Community Building and Urban Life

This chapter focuses on theories and contemporary scholarly debates on community building as a means to improve livability and social cohesion in disadvantaged and heterogeneous urban settings. It shows how the necessity of creating social networks for people to be able to feel safe and at home in the city is stressed by many policy-makers, as well as anthropologists and sociologists. Seen from a political perspective, community building, feelings of belonging and social engagement are seen as prerequisites for urban neighborhoods and their dwellers to function well. The implementation of a community restaurant in a working class area in Amsterdam must be seen in light of decades of Dutch social interventions. As is shown, the exclusiveness of communities brings about contradictory outcomes.

Discourses of Deprivation and Ethnic and Racial Otherness

This chapter discusses ways in which discourses and fear serve to establish a sense of community, while simultaneously erecting barriers to outsiders. Two discourses are discerned that reinforce the difference between “us” and “them”: (1) a discourse of deprivation, deployed by the middle-class social workers, to distinguish themselves from the working class residents; and (2) a discourse of ethnic and racial otherness used by both the restaurant management and the visitors, who evoked collective fear and barriers for non-whites and Muslims. As the chapter shows, a mechanism of “ethnic leveraging” was brought into being, through which the white working class residents attempted to elevate themselves as a group by passing on the stigma of “being particularly problematic” to ethnic and racial others.

Introduction: Being the Other on the Other Side

In this chapter, the scope and focus of the research project are introduced, as well as the position of the researcher/author in the field. First, the main propositions of the book are presented: (1) that an inherent contradiction is embedded within all instances of community building: the construction of an in-group and, simultaneously, the establishment of a “constitutive outside” of “others”; and (2) that—as a state-supported social intervention—community building can provide a basis for the (re)establishment and (re)production of societal structures of inequality and the institutional exclusion of certain categories of citizens. Finally, I present the research questions, in addition to the qualitative methods that were used to answer them. I conclude with an introduction of the following chapters.

Planning of the Past

ABSTRACT The 1970s and 1980s mark a turning point in urban planning and architecture in the Netherlands. In reaction to the modernist urban planning of earlier decades, Dutch policy-makers and architects now aimed to restore “human beings as the measure of all things.” The penultimate example of Dutch architecture of this period is the so-called cauliflower neighborhood (“bloemkoolwijk”). These residential areas were deliberately constructed to stage “spontaneous” encounters between neighbors to stimulate social bonding and to encourage identification with the built environment. This article examines the discrepancy between the underlying assumptions of an ideal community, materialized in the design of cauliflower neighborhoods in the 1970s and 1980s, and the daily life experiences of contemporary residents living in two such neighborhoods. The article shows that instead of contributing to community building, the neighborhood design resulted in a lack of social cohesion in cauliflower neighborhoods.