Samenvatting

‘Volksbuurten’ (marginal neighborhoods) in Brabant emerged from poverty and backwardness, but have developed their own way to deal with it. ‘Deviant behavior’, including forms of illegal and criminal activity, is important in there. That behavior gradually gets sustainable features. These neighborhoods are usually the result of conscious and active government policy; in particular the approach of ‘antisocial behavior’ in the forties and fifties of the last century has been important. In this article the author first sketches the outlines of this particular ‘volksbuurten’ culture, to focus then on the history of a particular street in one of those neighborhoods and its culture around 1960: the Ruisvoornstraat in Tilburg. Knowledge of the history of these neighborhoods is one of the keys to understanding the specifics of the history of Brabant and its partial intertwining with a culture of acting illegally and criminally.