Top-down Community Building and the Politics of Inclusion

Fenneke Wekker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783319539645
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Políticas europeas

This book explores mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion involved in practices of community building through an ethnographic study of a neighborhood restaurant in Amsterdam. It presents important insights into the advantages and empowering effects of professional, top down community building in a disadvantaged neighborhood, as well as its tensions and contradictory outcomes. The core argument of the study is that, in spite of the abserved restaurant's well-intended and well-organized attempts to create an inclusive and heterogeneous local community, it instead established one both exclusive and homogeneous. Through a set of community building practices and discourses of "deprivation" and "ethnic and racial otherness, " the construction of collective fear for ethnic and racial "others" was indirectly facilitatedamong the white, working class visitors. As a result, insurmountable barriers were erected for non-white and non-native Dutch residents to become part of the local community. This project speaks to social scientists as well as social workers, governments, and policy-makers concerned with issues of social cohesion, informal networks, and professional community building in disadvantaged urban settings.

Table of contents

• Preface
• Contents
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Being the Other on the Other Side
• Chapter 2 Community Building and Urban Life
• Chapter 3 Community Building Practices
• Chapter 4 Discourses of Deprivation and Ethnic and Racial Otherness
• Chapter 5 Conclusion
• References
• Index