The New Neighbors: Urban revitalization in the Rosmolenwijk

This thesis report, the new neighbors: urban revitalization in the Rosmolenwijk, presents the socio-spatial effects that urban revitalization plans combined with the housing crisis (and other trends and policies) have on working-class neighborhoods. The working-class neighborhoods are built-up with mostly social housing to provide home for the...

Planning for Urban Social Sustainability: Towards a Human-Centred Operational Approach

In Europe, growing concerns about social segregation and social stability have pushed calls to make cities ‘inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’ higher on policy agendas. However, how to approach such generic policy objectives and operationalise them for planning practices is still largely unclear. This article makes a conceptual...

Reframing social mix in affordable housing initiatives in Italy and in the Netherlands: Closing the gap between discourses and practices?

European countries are facing rising demand for affordable housing by a widespread and differentiated audience. Both in Italy and in the Netherlands policy-makers and practitioners address this emerging need by implementing new social housing projects targeting diverse social groups – such as students, young households, welfare dependents, and...

Reflections on the European Social Housing Model and Opportunities for Collaborative Housing from a Dutch Perspective

By way of introduction, this chapter explains the main differences and convergences in housing provision paradigms in European and Chilean cities. From housing as part of Welfare State models, both societies have seen the replacement of the right to housing by the financialization of housing. The chapter highlights a red thread in this book,...

An exploration of concepts and polices on ‘affordable housing’ in England, Italy, Poland and The Netherlands

The term ‘affordable housing’ has been rapidly gaining currency over the last decade across Europe, both in policy and research circles. While it is often used as a synonym or close relative of the term ‘social housing’, more recently it is finding its own definition and policy instruments in specific cities and countries. However, boundaries...

The Support Paradox in Community Enterprise Experiments in the Netherlands

In many European countries, community-based entrepreneurship is increasingly considered as a means to initiate small-scale urban regeneration. However, residents in deprived neighbourhoods are often viewed to lack key entrepreneurial skills. Most research on community entrepreneurship support is based on cross-sectional studies and overly...

The conservation of modernist urban ensembles: Case studies from Amsterdam

Urban conservation, notably in Western Europe, grew from a reaction to the large Modernist monofunctional sub-urban expansion projects and programmes aimed at rationalising messy multifunctional historic cities. Conservationists responded reactively by celebrating the diversity and multi-layered character of the historic city. In the Netherlands...

Fighting a losing battle? Neighbourhood-based social mobility in times of retrenching social interventions

Social mobility is a key concept in neighbourhood-based policies in Europe and the US. The Dutch neighbourhood approach often implies physical restructuring combined with a range of economic and social mobility strategies such as counselling, citizenship courses, debt relief, work training / placement programs and language courses. However, the...

Dealing with living in poor neighbourhoods

In this prologue to the special issue, the guest editors place the contributions in the context of current debates on living in concentrated poverty neighbourhoods. These debates concern two broad categories of residents: poor households that are assisted to move from concentrations of poverty to lower-poverty areas (movers); and households (not...