This book focuses on the innovative forms of solidarity that develop around the joint appropriation and the envisaged common future of specific places. Drawing on examples from schools, streets, community centers, workplaces, churches, housing projects and sporting projects, it provides an alternative research agenda from the "loss of community" narrative. It explores how places are meeting grounds where people live with each other's differences, as well as sites where informal interactions between citizens and actors can turn private issues into citizenship acts and public claims on economic redistribution, cultural recognition or political representation.
Stijn Oosterlynck is Associate Professor in Urban Sociology at the University of Antwerp, Belgium.
Nick Schuermans is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre on Inequalities, Poverty, Social Exclusion and the City of the University of Antwerp and a teaching associate at the geography department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.
Maarten Loopmans is Associate Professor at the Division of Geography at KU Leuven, Belgium.
1. Beyond social capital: place, diversity and solidarity
Stijn Oosterlynck, Nick Schuermans & Maarten Loopmans
2. Mundane mutualities: Solidarity and strangership in everyday urban life
Mervyn Horgan
3. Learning to cope with superdiversity: place-based solidarities at a (pre-)primary Catholic school in Leuven, Belgium
Nick Schuermans & Pascal Debruyne
4. Building Coalitions: Solidarities, friendships, and tackling inequality
Helen F. Wilson
5. Self-building in northern Italy: Housing and place-based solidarities among strangers
Michela Semprebon & Martina Valsesia
6. Challenging the figure of the 'migrant entrepreneur'. Place-based solidarities in the Romanian arrival infrastructure in Brussels.
Bruno Meeus
7. The spatial solidarity of intentional neighbouring
Andy Walter, Katherine Hankins & Samuel Nowak
8. Football for solidarity: Bridging gaps between the Baka and the Bantu in East Cameroon
Harrison Esam Awuh & Floor Elisabeth Spijkers
9. Domesticating, festivalising and contesting space: Spatial acts of citizenship in a super-diverse neighbourhood in Amsterdam
Mandy de Wilde
10. Afterword: Solidarities, conjunctures, encounters
David Featherstone