Do People Who Like Diversity Practice Diversity in Neighbourhood Life? Neighbourhood Use and the Social Networks of ‘Diversity-Seekers’ in a Mixed Neighbourhood in the Netherlands

Abstract

Urban policies in various countries aim at integrating minorities into mainstream society through combating residential segregation. One strategy is to change the housing stock. Assuming that the middle classes leave certain neighbourhoods because they lack suitable dwellings, building more expensive dwellings is an important policy trajectory in the Netherlands. However, living in the proximity of other income groups is in itself insufficient to overcome racial, ethnic and class divides in social networks. The usual policy indicator for defining ‘middle class’, e.g. income, is not a very good predictor for the diversity of networks of people living in mixed neighbourhoods. What, then, is? The first step is to ask what distinguishes people who prefer diverse neighbourhoods. Are people who are attracted by the diversity of an area different from others? Next, we question whether people who like diversity have more diversity in their networks or contribute in other ways to a more integrated neighbourhood through their use of it. We use social network data collected in a mixed inner-city neighbourhood in Rotterdam to explore this. We argue that attracting people to an area because of its diversity may contribute to the economic viability of local businesses and possibly to the nature of interactions in public space. However, we can not empirically substantiate that a preference for a diverse neighbourhood translates into distinct practices or social networks that enhance the integration of ethnic minorities into mainstream society.

Keywords:

• Cohesion
• Ethnic Diversity
• Integration
• Neighbourhood
• Social Networks
• Rotterdam

Acknowledgements

The empirical work for this research was funded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences through a personal grant to the first author, and further supported by the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, where the first author was employed at the time of the data collection. We thank the 14 student researchers and two assistants, Lotje Sodderland and Shelli Branscombe, for their help with the data collection and entry, and Deborah de Jong for her support with some of the analysis. Thanks also to the participants of the W10 workshop at the ENHR conference in Ljubljana, 2–5 July 2006, where we presented an earlier version of this paper, to the anonymous JEMS referees and to Gideon Bolt, for their helpful comments. Thanks also to Alexandra Curley for her comments on content—and on our English.

Notes

1. Other possible answers could draw attention to institutional barriers or opportunities for ethnic ties (or a social infrastructure, see RMO 2006), to ethnic and racial prejudices (for example Verkuyten 1997) and symbolic neighbourhood use and attachment (Blokland 2003).

2. See Galster (2007) on the potential ways in which social mix at the neighbourhood level might affect residential outcomes.

3. When we say ‘practice diversity’ we refer to diversity as a shared doing, similar to the notion in Jenkins (1996) of identity and community as verbs rather than nouns.

4. This is approximately the equivalent of three years of college in the United States.

5. This approach was based on adaptations of the work of Fischer (1982) and, in particular, the publications and help of Völker (1995), who generously shared her survey on social support in Dutch neighbourhoods with the first author.

6. We used the US census job-classification schemes.

7. It was technically impossible to list an item of ‘similarity’ in this survey question, so we cannot test directly the commonly taken-for-granted notion that ethnic minorities opt for certain neighbourhoods because they find people ‘like them’ there; we have, however, acquired a sense of similarity with others in the neighbourhood through the questions ‘Do you think people in the neighbourhood overall are pretty much like you, or quite different from you?’ and ‘Do you think people whom you personally know in the neighbourhood are pretty much like you or quite different from you?’. The answers did not vary significantly for native and non-native Dutch residents.

8. In the entire survey, the number of people who read a quarterly bulletin distributed door-to-door by local community organisations was so low that no further analysis was possible.

9. One may wonder whether length of residence is not an important factor explaining why diversity-seekers have no diverse networks yet: they may simply not have had time enough to establish them. However, we think they then would have a lower number of local ties overall—and that is not the case. Only if people keep developing the number of ties over time—and networks in neighbourhoods thus keep growing over time—would diversity-seekers eventually have more local ties. They tend to live there for a relatively short time but still have a similar percentage of local ties. However, for the degree of diversity we have looked at a relative measure: only if diverse ties are slower in developing would length of residence matter. We have no theoretical reason why diversity-seekers would develop diverse ties so much more slowly than they would ties with people like themselves for a statistical effect to occur.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Talja Blokland

Talja Blokland is Professor of Urban and Regional Sociology at Humbolt University

Gwen van Eijk

Gwen van Eijk is PhD Candidate at Delft University of Technology