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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.

Purpose – Based on a case study of citizens’ summits in Amsterdam, this chapter examines competing aims bound up in attempts to create an in-between space where participants struggle to obtain a sense of belonging against the background of (non)diversity.

Methodology/Approach – A qualitative case study approach is used based on participant observation, informal talks with participants, and interviews with the summit organizers.

Findings – A citizens’ summit can be seen as an in-between space where narratives of citizens should dominate instead of (local) governmental rhetoric. Citizens´ summits create a voice for citizens who are normally less heard in the public debate. To what extent this can be achieved depends on how a summit enables a diversity of participants to practice dialogue, create common ground and share ownership of ideas, problems and solutions. Our findings provide insight into contested belonging within the democratic system in the Netherlands and elsewhere.

Social Implications – We suggest that belonging, space and diversity affect social boundaries between those in the electoral democratic system and those participating in citizens’ summits. Focussing on these can lead towards more inclusive democratic systems for all.

Originality/Value of the Paper – Citizens’ summits are often seen as a democratic tool that supplements the electoral democracy. This study looks at the interactions between participants, revealing much about the functioning of deliberative space in citizens’ summits. We also focus on the issue of participant diversity and how senses of belonging include or exclude sections of society.

Based on a case study of conversion of real estate complexes built in Turin at the time of the 2006 Winter Olympic Games into public and subsidized housing, the chapter compares policy goals aimed at producing social mix through the mixing of housing tenure, with actual outcomes and thus identifies possible advantages, challenges, and pitfalls of this kind of intervention.

The analysis is based on a survey and semi-structured interviews with residents, in-depth interviews with key actors, and observation of daily interactions in public and shared places.

Regeneration policies and tenure mix seem to be most effective at preventing neighborhood stigmatization and attract private investments in facility development (area-based effects), but not to be “automatically” a source of mixed social relations and positive role models able to limit socially disapproved behaviors (people-based effects).

The practical lesson which can be drawn from this chapter is that the achievement of people-based effects requires long-standing actions which go beyond the construction and allocation of new apartments.

The chapter engages critically with the idea that built environment has deterministic effects on social environment, and social mix resulted from regeneration and housing policies can work as a catch-all solution for activating and rehabilitating human and social resources in the target area. Specifically, we show how these processes require particular organizational and policy conditions that cannot be taken for granted.

Purpose – This chapter examines place-based social practices and experiences, conceptualized as ‘belonging’, among older Americans who live in senior mobile home communities in Florida.

Design/Methodology/Approach – Pursuing a grounded theory approach, the chapter is based on 18 ethnographic interviews with senior mobile home households, conducted between 2005 and 2007.

Findings – Following lifestyle migration, senior Floridians developed interrelated, yet distinct, forms of belonging within their varying social and spatial environments, combining elements of selective, elective and resistant belonging.

Originality/Value – The study participants’ focus on shared and socially valued group characteristics in their construction of place-based identity problematizes the possibility of a successful integration of outsiders, raising new questions for the concept and future study of belonging.