Many big cities in Europe have adopted the contours of superdiversity: in many districts, the original population has become just one of the many minorities. This new urban reality is often perceived as threatening. Immigration has become symbolic for the disturbance of community, the undermining of the national identity and a lost sense of feeling at home. Although the concept of superdiversity has controversial meanings, it also functions as an inspiring analytical concept that encourages further reflections on the value and potential implications of living together in cities of arrival. The concept also creates space for multifocal perspectives on socioeconomic, religious, transnational and political differences instead of reducing the urban reality to mere ethnic or cultural differences.

The main cities in the Netherlands and Belgium are becoming superdiverse majority-minority cities. This implies more than increasing diversity, but involves an increasing diversification of diversity and (contested) processes of normalization of diversity. The article explores the increase of temporary citizens and undocumented migrants as part of this transition. The rise of intra-EU-migration and transmigration contributes to an increase of temporary citizens. Using the case of Antwerp (Belgium), the article analyses the presence of undocumented migrants, using data of the collective regularization in Belgium in 2009, and of transmigrants, building upon an explorative research in Antwerp & Brussels in 2015.

Amsterdam and Rotterdam both have become majority-minority cities. Cities where all ethnic population groups, including that of Dutch descent, now form a minority. Most migration research focusses on the integration of a variety of migrant groups in the city. This article addresses the group forgotten in migration research: the people of Dutch descent. What does it mean for people of Dutch descent to be part of an ethnic group that is becoming increasingly smaller in the super-diverse neighborhoods of the city? Amsterdam is often regarded as the example of a ‘happy’ super-diverse city, while Rotterdam considered to be an ‘unhappy’ super-diverse city. Our research confirms that in Rotterdam people of Dutch descent draw brighter boundaries between themselves and people of other ethnic backgrounds than their peers in Amsterdam do. It is remarkable that the difference between Rotterdam and Amsterdam is especially evident among people in the middle and higher echelons of the labour market, and less so among the working class. What causes this difference? In both cities, we see that people from the creative sector and people working in law enforcing occupations like police, army and security are characterized by a stabile attitude towards ethnic diversity. The cities’ general climate seems to influence – both positively and negatively – mainly those in administrative, technical, financial and social professions, where we find less stable attitudes towards diversity.

Superdiverse neighborhoods are understood as challenges; as potential ghetto’s in need for a better social mix. In this paper, ethnographic linguistic landscape analysis (ELLA) is used to study the effects of the public-private city renewal policies. ELLA not only enables a distributional image of ‘het Rabot’, a small neighborhood in the pheriphery of Ghent in Belgium, but also to sketch a stratigraphy. The ideology of social mix, in combination with the inter-urban competition for tourists and middle class inhabitants results in the hipsterification of the neighborhood. The net effect, is a disruptive influx of a creative class.

In this article we report on an ethnographic research project conducted in 2014-2015 at a school for ‘Assistant in Care and Wellbeing’, a school for secondary vocational training that is part of a large regional education center in the metropolitan area of the Randstad. The main incentive for our research was that some researchers assumed that in this ‘super-diverse’ environment, where students with an immigrant background were a vast majority, many tensions and conflicts were caused by ethnic and religious differences between students. However, after about 100 hours of observations in the classes of fourteen teachers, 36 interviews with teachers and other staff, and focus group discussions with teachers and students, we found that for most students diversity wasn’t a big issue at all. Rather than ethnic or religious differences many irritations and conflicts were triggered by the constantly changing organisational setting and institutional context of the school. In this article, we will corroborate this finding with a detailed analysis of some cases of classroom interaction, and draw conclusions about the usefulness and limits of superdiversity as a heuristic tool.

Advocates of superdiversity have a potential blind spot for differences in symbolic power that affect integration. Thus, they quickly ignore class inequalities and racism. But the main point of criticism is that superdiversity neglects the mainstream, the dominant ways of thinking and doing in a society. The majority of the Netherlands has become more and more culturally homogenous: after a long time of cultural polarization (the long decade of the sixties), the majority has taken over consensually libertarian ideals. The implication of this is that cultural diversity is experienced as a growing problem. Citizens, including migrants, must show that they feel connected with the Netherlands.

The ‘condition of superdiversity’ creates a dazzling perspective that matches the image of a networking society without unambiguous collective entities. Society consists of a caleidoscopic set of identities, relationships, languages and gods in a context of permeable geographic areas. That brings many problems, but the country that is aware of this diversity does have ultimately the best papers for the future.

This paper links the discussion on superdiversity and its call for multidimensional shifts in migration patterns and the ‘diversification of diversity’ this has led to, to the development of immigrant integration policies that tend to focus on traditional migrant groups. Considered from the superdiversity perspective these groups are an simplification of the diversity within and between the migrant population. Furthermore, the diversification of the society as a whole calls into question who should be targeted for immigrant integration policies at all, and in what direction they should point, in a society that has changed itself as a consequence of immigration (Crul, 2016). How do these questions speak to the world of immigrant integration policy making? This paper links this question to the trend of ‘mainstreaming’ in immigrant integration governance. Across Europe traditional immigrant integration policies have been replaced by universal policies, generic policies, targeted at the entire population, such as broad city-citizenship approaches or incorporating former immigrant integration policies in generic educational or community policies. This paper discusses material from different European cases between 2000-2014 to explore whether this broad, mainstreaming approach can be considered a policy-answer to the questions and challenges the superdiversity discussion raises for immigrant integration policies.

Contemporary cities are increasingly characterised by ‘super diversity’. As Putnam’s thesis about the negative social consequences of ethnic diversity is correct, we may assume that growing diversity also negatively affects crime and fear of crime in cities. After all: the more diversity, the less social cohesion and the less collective efficacy, ultimately resulting in higher crime rates. More diversity also implies less (public) familiarity in neighbourhoods and more fear of crime. On the other hand, some qualitative studies show that particularly residents of relatively homogeneous districts perceive migrants as threatening. Migrants are seen as less threatening when neighbourhood residents are familiarized with ‘the other’ and when there are more interethnic contacts. Various foreign and Dutch studies show an independent effect of ethnic diversity in the neighbourhood on fear of crime. However, this effect disappears when other resident characteristics are included into the analysis. Residents of ethnically diverse and deprived districts are generally less satisfied with their neighbourhood, have less trust in the government and are more often victimized. Precisely these perceptions and experiences explain why they more often feel unsafe in their own neighbourhood.

On the occasion of the publication of a collection of articles by Stanley Cohen in 2016 (edited by Tom Deams), René van Swaaningen pays a tribute to this important, thought-provoking and pioneering thinker in criminology. He takes Cohen’s adage that we as critical criminologists always have to balance between intellectual scepticism and political commitment as a starting point for an analysis of his work. Cohen’s rejection of criminology as a liberal project may have led him to defining himself as an ‘anti-criminologist’, yet at the same time Cohen has been able to transform the discipline as such into a more power-critical direction. Two of Cohen’s key-contributions to criminological theory, those on moral panics and on denial, are discussed and related to each other. Whilst adopting Foucault’s analyses of power as a constructing practice, Cohen, in his work on social control, rejects the pessimist implications of Foucault’s work, in which human agency is defined away. In this essay, the relation of Cohen’s work with that of his mentor David Matza is also discussed, as well as is his great and ironic style of writing.