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Abstract
When immigrants arrive to their city of destination, both the immigrants and the veterans are at a risk of losing their sense of place, which is an important functioning. Can this functioning be secured in the context of immigration? I argue that it can, as indeed Amsterdam and Thessaloniki, the two cities studied here, do rather successfully.
About the Author
Avner de Shalit (D.Phil Oxford, 1990) is the Max Kampelman Professor of Democracy and Human Rights at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of Cities and Immigration (OUP, 2018) The Environment: Between Theory and Practice (OUP, 2000), Why Posterity Matters (Routledge, 1995) and co-author (with Jonathan Wolff) of Disadvantage (OUP, 2007) and (with Daniel Bell) of The Spirit of Cities (Princeton UP, 2011). In 2014 he received the Rothschild Prize for social sciences.
Notes
* This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Human Development and Capabilities Association in Buenos Aires, 2018. I am thankful to all who offered comments and criticism.
1 By the spirit of the city I mean a dominant ethos to which many in the city subscribe. See Bell and de Shalit (Citation2011).
2 Many of the findings described here are taken from de Shalit (Citation2018).
3 By civicism I mean a special pride in one’s city. It often relates to the way in which “cities have been increasingly the mechanism by which people oppose globalization and its tendency to flatten cultures into sameness.” (Bell and de Shalit Citation2011, 4–5).
4 PRE stands for Public Reflective Equilibrium. These interviews are more like discussions conducted in the classroom. The interviewee is asked for a rather long discussion—sometimes it can get as long as forty or fifty minutes—in which s/he is asked not only for her / his opinions or preferences but for his or her theories, or justified positions. Like in student at the classroom, during this discussion the interviewee is challenged by the interviewer, so that at the end s/he can consistently and coherently justify her / his position. The result is not analyzed statistically but serves as inspiration for the researcher’s theory. For more about this method see de Shalit (Citation2000) and Wolff and de Shalit (Citation2007). See also a forthcoming issue of The Australian Philosophical Review which is devoted to the PRE method.
6 For a step by step and more profound discussion see de Shalit (Citation2018).
7 This is based on research about more than twenty cities. See Bell and de Shalit (Citation2011, Citation2017).
8 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/24/french-police-make-woman-remove-burkini-on-nice-beach.
9 I am thankful to my research assistant Ms. Tal Eldar, who conducted some of the interviews. Eldar also conducted interviews in Rotterdam, enabling us to compare the results and see whether what we found in Amsterdam was typical of the city rather than of the country. Indeed this was the case.