Rotterdam: Social Contacts in Poor Neighbourhoods

Abstract

A large amount of literature exists on the topic of the physical and social development of neighbourhoods. It seems that no firm generalizations can be made about the relation between physical and social characteristics of neighbourhoods. Of course, some standard works are known, such as Oscar Newman’s Defensible Space (Newman, 1972), and Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs, 1961), but these books mainly focus on details of neighbourhoods, such as sidewalks and corridors. A more general question such as: ‘Does an area built in the 1960s offer better life chances than an area built at the end of the nineteenth or beginning of the twentieth century?’ has not been answered adequately in the literature. Probably, this is because the question is too difficult, mainly because differential spatial contexts always lead to different answers.

This chapter is based on the URBEX-report written by Botman and Van Kempen (2001).