A Resident’s View on Social Mix

Abstract

Many players in the urban and housing policy arenas believe that social mix in urban areas does enhance the opportunities in life. It can be a key factor in bringing back socially cohesive urban neighbourhoods and this in turn has various positive spin-offs. Social mix therefore has become one of the supposedly promising and explicit targets in today’s urban policies in countries including the Netherlands, Sweden, United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Denmark and others (Musterd et al., 2003, Kleinhans, 2004). More mixed communities would provide good role models next to weaker ones, and interaction between individuals would potentially create positive socialisation processes. Many scholars argue that mixed environments would enhance the quality of — albeit weak — social relations between people because successful people will mix with less successful people and the former is assumed to provide help, in one way or another, to improve the life chances of the latter (Wilson, 1987, Jargowsky, 1997). More mixed neighbourhoods would also imply a reduction in negative reputation that might be connected to rather homogeneous settings in which weak social positions prevail (see Friedrichs, 1998, Leventhal and Brooks-Gunn, 2000, Sampson et al., 2002).