Skip to main content
Palgrave Macmillan
Book cover

Top-down Community Building and the Politics of Inclusion

  • Book
  • © 2017

Overview

  • Speaks to both social scientists, as well as social workers, governments and policy makers concerned with issues of professional community building in disadvantaged urban settings
  • Raises awareness for implicit forms of discrimination and racism unintentionally made a part of informal network formation in heterogeneous urban settings
  • Contributes to larger scholarly debates on (institutionalized) mechanisms of in- and exclusion, social solidarity, social capital and the (re)production of moral boundaries along lines of class, race and ethnicity
  • Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

eBook USD 44.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 59.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 59.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

Table of contents (5 chapters)

Keywords

About this book

This book explores mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion involved in practices of community building through an ethnographic study of a neighborhood restaurant in Amsterdam. It presents important insights into the advantages and empowering effects of professional, top down community building in a disadvantaged neighborhood, as well as its tensions and contradictory outcomes. The core argument of the study is that, in spite of the abserved restaurant's well-intended and well-organized attempts to create an inclusive and heterogeneous local community, it instead established one both exclusive and homogeneous. Through a set of community building practices and discourses of "deprivation" and "ethnic and racial otherness," the construction of collective fear for ethnic and racial “others" was indirectly facilitated among the white, working class visitors. As a result, insurmountable barriers were erected for non-white and non-native Dutch residents to become part of the local community. This project speaks to social scientists as well as social workers, governments, and policy-makers concerned with issues of social cohesion, informal networks, and professional community building in disadvantaged urban settings.




Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of Sociology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Fenneke Wekker

About the author

Fenneke Wekker is a researcher, writer, lecturer, editor, and project-leader. Her research focuses on community building practices and discourses; the current welfare state transition in the Netherlands and its consequences on everyday lives of vulnerable citizens in heterogeneous urban settings; public space design and social cohesion; feelings, notions, and practices of home and belonging; and mechanisms of (institutional) in- and exclusion. She has published articles in Home Cultures and other journals.

Bibliographic Information

Publish with us