Place, Diversity and Solidarity

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. The book reflects on the different spatiotemporal frames in which solidarities are nurtured, the connections forged between solidarity and citizenship, and the role of interventions by professionals to nurture solidarity in diversity.

Stijn Oosterlynck is Associate Professor in Urban Sociology at the University of Antwerp, Belgium.

Maarten Loopmans is Associate Professor at the Division of Geography at KU Leuven, Belgium.

Nick Schuermans is a post-doctoral 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.