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Contributions from European Symbolic Interactionists:
Conflict and Cooperation
Women and the Gender Gap in Urban Sociology: A Case Study of Afrikaanderwijk,
South Rotterdam
Teana Boston-Mammah
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WOMEN AND THE GENDER GAP
IN URBAN SOCIOLOGY: A CASE
STUDY OF AFRIKAANDERWIJK,
SOUTH ROTTERDAM
Teana Boston-Mammah
ABSTRACT
This research paper explores the role of women talk (schmoozing) and
the gender gap in urban sociology. In the discussions concerning the
changing face of the Dutch inner cities, there is an increasing tendency
for attention to be paid to ethnicity, without a concomitant analysis of
the impact of gender in these neighbourhoods. Many Dutch urban theor-
ists focus on examining both the levels and effects of segregation in
urban neighbourhoods and how this impacts integration and community
building in the Netherlands. This study, in seeking to redress this imbal-
ance, ﬁrmly places women at the centre of urban theoretical enquiry.
Using the results of unstructured interviews and observation I am able to
offer an assessment of the many ways in which ethnically embedded gen-
der relations have impacted on the urban and social spaces known as
Afrikaanderwijk. A key line of enquiry being: what role do women play
Contributions from European Symbolic Interactionists: Conﬂict and Cooperation
Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 45, 23À49
Copyright r 2015 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1108/S0163-239620150000045011
23

and how are they visible in/at the local neighbourhood level, specifi-
cally in the form of everyday, informal social contacts?
Keywords: Gender; ethnicity; social capital; public space; neighbour-
hood contact; public familiarity
PROLOGUE
My colleague is yet again regaling me with stories about what the women in
her neighbourhood have been doing and organizing, for themselves and the
other women who live there. Telling me about her brother and sister and her-
self who are involved with different foundations in the area all aiming to edu-
cate and improve those living there. But wait isn’t that the area in Rotterdam
that is always in the news negatively, where kids are delinquents, women are
oppressed by their husbands, the schools are segregated and the men are too
sick to work but not too sick to sit in a cafe´ all day long drinking & smoking.
Yes that’s the same place … bad press, she says, smiling at me.
INTRODUCTION
This chapter aims to examine the dominant Dutch integration discourse by
examining the relationship between women and public space use in
Afrikaanderwijk, south Rotterdam. This enquiry is set against the back-
drop of urban sociology that has failed to utilize gender as an analytic fra-
mework for social change (Lofland, 1975; Spain, 2002). It also engages
with a discourse where women’s relationship to public space is couched in
terms of fear, most notably the fear of men (Day, 2006). Most significantly,
this chapter assesses women’s experience of public space in terms of their
everyday reality and social interaction.
In the Netherlands much of the discourse on public space use centres
around two main themes. Firstly, male youths from a Moroccan or Antillean
background whose anti-social and sometimes criminal behaviour gives rise to
widespread social concern and much media attention (Bovenkerk, 2002;
Jong, 2007). Secondly, the concentration of poor populations in poor areas,
as a result of contiguous migration, flows of people experienced by much of
Western Europe. As a result of an ever-increasing transglobal economic rea-
lity many inner city areas have become home to economically disadvantaged
migrant or guest worker(s). The areas in which many migrants settle are
24 TEANA BOSTON-MAMMAH

characterized by cheap relatively old housing stock, higher levels of unem-
ployment and poverty and smaller numbers of the native Dutch population.
Many of the affluent workers have moved out of the inner city areas, charac-
teristic of the process of suburbanization. Simon categorizes this type of pro-
cess as one of ‘degeneration’ (2006, p. 215). Leading to what other authors in
urban sociology have termed the dual city (Mollenkopf & Castells, 1991) or
global city (Sassen, 1991). Segregation and an impermeable anonymity
among city dwellers are de facto results.
The debate regarding community cohesion has been framed within the
discourse of social capital, becoming highly politicized. Star academics like
Putnam (2000, 2007) have focused on the types of social capital present in
these troublesome neighbourhoods and the impact on the social climate
thereof. Political concerns are reflected in the ever-increasing body of evi-
dence produced by scholars on inter-ethnic contact, residential segregation,
anti-minority sentiments, social distance, prejudice, social capital and social
cohesion (Dagevos & Gijsberts, 2003; Gesthuizen, Van der Meer, &
Scheepers, 2009; Friedrichs, Galster, & Musterd, 2005; Scheffer, 2007; Van
der Laan Bouma-Doff, 2007).
THE DUTCH MIGRANT CONTEXT
Scheffer, a prominent Dutch academic is said to have kicked off the dra-
matic change in attitudes to integration policies and perceptions in 2000
with his biting indictment of the failure of multiculturalism as a political
and social strategy in the Netherlands (Snel & Stock, 2008, cited in Grillo,
2008). Furthermore, Scheffer’s article, The Multicultural Fiasco (2000) sig-
nalled the rise of cultural over and above socio-economic explanations of
the failure of certain ethnic minorities to integrate into Dutch society. The
time when the strain between the dominant culture and the minority cul-
tures was becoming openly visible coincided with the 9/11 terrorist attacks
on the American dream. Scheffer’s line of thought privileges culture above
socio-economic rationalizations, as an analytical tool, in judging ethnic
minorities as having failed to integrate into Dutch society, thereby reinfor-
cing the migrant as problematic due to a perceived cultural negative. The
overrepresentation of Moroccan male youth in the crime statistics has
come to symbolize the failure of Dutch integration policies and the
deviancy of Moroccan culture as a whole. However, these types of explana-
tions centring on the perceived cultural deficiency of ethnic minorities are
25Women and the Gender Gap in Urban Sociology

essentialist in nature, serving to reduce a complex, dynamic myriad of fac-
tors to one determining characteristic. One aspect of this process of reifica-
tion of culture is the ‘false fixing of boundaries’, between groups that in
Scheffer’s analysis, seem insurmountable, timeless and reflect a ‘them
against us’ mentality. Essentialist interpretations leave little room for
dynamic social or individual transformative processes, embracing a rather
static notion of the individual not susceptible to social processes outside of
his/her culture and within themselves (Baumann, 1996).
Compounding the so-called integration problem is that those moving
into these neighbourhoods are predominantly poorly educated, economic-
ally weak and linguistically non-Dutch-speaking and those moving out are
highly or well educated, economically strong Dutch-speaking citizens.
Latten (2005), another Dutch sociologist, has argued that the differences
between those at the top and bottom of the socio-economic ladder in the
Netherlands will only increase. Focusing on the second generation immi-
grant population and contrasting their developments with the native Dutch
populace, he persuasively accounts for a growing divide by analyzing the
effects of ethnic concentration on educational opportunities, choice of part-
ner, employment and the related levels of income. In doing so he challenges
the Chicago school perspective on immigration, which based on a linear/
evolutionary concept of immigration, has argued that in time every new
generation becomes more integrated into the host country. In the current
political acceptance of Scheffer’s arguments, it would be fair to conclude
that the process of integration is not seen to be working rapidly enough
(Gijsberts & Dagevos, 2005). Scheffer’s statements echo a wider societal
dissatisfaction with the current integration process, that ethnic groups cul-
tural identity remains homogenous and uncontested, leading ultimately to
social exclusion and cultural alienation. An inevitable consequence of this
state of affairs is the clash of culture and ethnicity witnessed in the French
riots in Clichy-sous-Bois, France in 2005 (Scheffer, 2007). This image of
clashing, rioting was held up as a forewarning to the Dutch of what was to
become a reality if immigrants were not put under more pressure to accom-
modate to the receiving cultures norms and values.
THE GENDER GAP
Having set the discursive scene I will now attempt to examine and redress
the visible gaps in this discourse. How does gender manifest itself in the

discourse just mentioned? A discourse I see as part of the theorization of
urban change. Clearly we are witnessing the creation of a disturbing narra-
tive both for the host culture and for the migrant groups targeted. As I
indicated in the beginning much of the negative focus is reserved for cul-
tural differences. Moving to women, what role do they specifically play in
the anti-culture discourse? In what way can women be said to not to want
to integrate? In the recent Dutch framing (Brink, 2006; Scheffer, 2007) or
anti-multiculturalist discourse (Grillo, 2005) women from Muslim countries
or cultures have been held up as more or less victims of their patriarchal
culture, tradition and religion. The veil or headscarf has increasingly
become a symbol for this suppression and control over women. As
Afsaruddin notes ‘from the non-Muslim and especially modern Western
viewpoint, female coveredness has often impressionistically served as a bar-
ometer for gauging female subjugation … veiling as a consequence becomes
equated with powerlessness and dependency, while its absence is associated
with independent feminist agency’ (Afsaruddin & Ameri, 1999, p. 7). The
failure to integrate that this wearing of the veil/headscarf implies, leads to
disruption, disjuncture, a threat to social safety for the host society and the
cultural integrity of the nation (Stolcke, 1993, p. 2). Furthermore, it is
important to bear in mind that the process of secularization The
Netherlands has been through has created a discourse of religious neutral-
ity around public space use (Blokland, 2003). The presence of groups of
women who visibly challenge this notion of neutrality by symbolically
bringing back customs and beliefs into the public realm is in this sense pro-
vocative within the confines of a culture that defines itself as religiously
neutral.
Having sketched some of the narratives relevant to this study I want to
reframe the discussion on break down, in other terms. Reframing firstly a
narrative that relies rather heavily on the group, be it minority, ethnic or
immigrant as an interpretive given. Secondly I want to make visible the
experiences of migrant woman, some of whom are also seen as a social pro-
blem, living in a problematized urban area. How do women experience
their lives in these spaces? I want to explore the gender gap at the heart of
urban studies where the conjunction of two predominant associations
meets. One is a proclivity to assume an ungendered neutral other in studies
of migration and ethnicity; the other is an ideology-constructing woman as
situated in domesticated private spaces, which as Afsaruddin has noted is
also utilized in contemporary representations of Islamic women in western
societies. Thirdly, public spaces are valuable locations in that they are
where the symbolic and physical attachment to a public in many cases

national identity meet. They are often, however, assumed to be inherently
male. The assumption that public spaces are threatening to women under-
lies this supposition and while I would not decry the statistics on street har-
assment, violence be it verbal or physical and the concomitant fear and
anxiety this produces, there are other experiences that could also be
explored.
In the Netherlands there is little research on gender, and the social con-
struction of spatiality’s. In the United Kingdom, McDowell (1992, 1997a,
1997b, 1999) has done much to develop and review the changes within fem-
inist geography. McDowell observes that both the notion of gender and
space have by some scholars (Haraway, 1991; Massey, 1984) been decon-
structed and likened to nodes within a set of fields or a network of loca-
tions. One of the questions McDowell posits is: how are we to go about
theorizing the significance of space in the differences among women? No
simple task but as McDowell notes, ‘feminist scholarship more broadly
also coincides with feminist geography in its interest in the place that loca-
tion plays in the construction of gendered identities’ (McDowell, 1993,
p. 11). This is a departure from the quest to understand immigrant spatial
patterns and ethnic enclaves in human geography, deeply influenced by the
Chicago School, where the focus was firmly placed on ungendered immi-
grant residential patters, in predominantly urban areas.
In the US context, Spain (2002) too is critical of the gender blindness at
the core of the Chicago School tradition, where women were the sum total
of their domestic role as housewife. Spain’s research has done much to
expound on the active role that women have played in the modernization
and post-modernization story. Her work offers an insightful assessment of
the many ways in which gender relations have impacted on urban and
social spaces. One of these is the change wrought by women moving out of
the home and into the office. Spain maintains that while women were at
home all day, supervising both children playing outside and the home itself,
while doing the gardening or chatting with the neighbours there was no
need for ‘gated communities’, women provided an informal level of surveil-
lance, security and social contact.
Spain’s attack on the gender gap within urban sociology is again charac-
teristic of the growth of feminism within sociology and social geography.
Feminist scholars in both these fields particularly during the 1980s have
gathered much evidence on the socio-spatial consequences of the women’s
revolution (Hayden, 1995; McDowell, 1997a, 1997b; Wilson, 1992; Wolff,
1995). Wilson reconstructed the links between urban areas and the social
construction of gender in a variety of cities from the nineteenth century

onwards. One of the early pioneers in this field Lofland (1975), in her arti-
cle exploring the ‘thereness’ of women, contends that women perform
much of the hidden work surrounding neighbourhood maintenance via
their daily routines. However, this maintenance has remained invisible to
urban sociologists, women in urban sociology, Lofland reasons, are mostly
and simply there, not part of the analytic action merely functioning as
background figures.
Reflecting on this gender gap within urban sociology and the dominant
narratives surrounding ethnic minorities, in disadvantaged urban areas, led
me back to the question posed by McDowell: how are we to go about theo-
rizing the significance of space in the differences among women? It is this
challenge that I have set myself in this study of Afrikaanderwijk.
PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS OF AFRIKAANDERWIJK
Afrikaanderwijk is a neighbourhood in the district Feijenoord, south
Rotterdam, lying on the south side of the river Maas that cuts through
Rotterdam. Coming into Afrikaanderwijk from the city takes one from the
big wide scale of expensive high-rise new dual-purpose buildings for work-
ing and living. Crossing the beautiful Erasmus Bridge and following the
river south you see the old dockyards in varying stages of being renovated.
Wide lanes take you into Hillekop that turning left leads into
Afrikaanderwijk with its wide square1
ringed on two sides by a car lane.
Around the square is a park, a mosque, a school, some flats for the elderly
and a community centre all within easy walking distance. On the outer ring
on two sides of the square are some shops and amenities, on the northern
side a mosque and on the eastern side social housing. Afrikaanderwijk lies
1.5 km from the city centre.
On my visits to Afrikaanderwijk I have observed men sitting in cafes or
standing outside talking, drinking and eating together, women sitting in
Afrikaanderpark with children while they play and run about, women
walking on their way to the shops, market and public transport stops.
I have seen a lot of young children going to the school on Afrikaander
Square. Afrikaanderwijk does not feel like a traditional Dutch neighbour-
hood to me, with its combination of ethnic shops, Turkish and Moroccan
bakeries, Turkish cafes (full of men drinking and smoking) and intermittent
groups of women walking by dressed in hijabs, speaking Turkish, Berber,
and Arabic peppered, in many cases with Dutch words. The market,

arriving twice a week, transforms the relatively sleepy area into a bustling
hub of activity, noise and litter. Here people meet up, have quick chats,
some stand for a while talking before moving on. It is on these days that
the diversity of the area is most visible.
AFRIKAANDERWIJK THEN AND NOW
Afrikaanderwijk itself occupies an unusual place in the Dutch history of
race relations, being one of the few sites where a ‘race riot’ has taken place.
In 1972, tensions ﬂared between Dutch residents and Turkish guest work-
ers, Dutch nationals were fed up of what they saw as preferential housing
allocation for non-Dutch migrants. These residents angrily stormed the
hostels where Turkish workers lived and threw all their belongings onto the
street. The conﬂict escalated, taking seven days to bring to an end.
Afrikaanderwijk is highly diverse and the array of cultural narratives has
only increased since the 1970s. Additionally this area has continued to
attract much political and media attention whilst receiving a fairly continu-
ous stream of funding from the Dutch government in its attempts to regen-
erate the area.2
In the Dutch collective memory Afrikaanderwijk continues
to occupy a place where shabby, cheap social housing and a constant
stream of poor non-Dutch speaking immigrants reign supreme. This mem-
ory has recently been rekindled by the publication of the journalist Jutta
Chorus’s controversial book Afri: Life in a migrant neighbourhood (2009).
Afrikaanderwijk is a good place to set my study; its diversity makes it
relevant to my topic of work. Furthermore it is a demonstrably different
experience of diversity than is generally to be found in the United States or
United Kingdom, where ethnic segregation is the order of the day. The
demographic evidence on the ethnic character Afrikaanderwijk shows an
84% to 16% split. White Dutch residents make up 16% of the roughly
9000 residents; several ethnic groups make up the rest. Starting with the
biggest group: 34% is Turkish, 13% is Moroccan, 13% is Surinamese, 5%
is Antillean, 3% is from Cape Verdi3
and the last 16% contains a diverse
range of ethnicities. After World War II with the arrival of members of the
former colonies: Suriname, Antilles, the Dutch East Indies now known as
Indonesia The Netherlands became a country of immigration.4
The 1970s
saw the arrival of Turkish and Moroccan mainly male guest workers,
women and children arrived later. During this period, immigrants from
Suriname, the Antilles and asylum seekers also arrived looking for work

and shelter. Afrikaanderwijk offered good employment opportunities for
manual labourers to work in the dockyards. As in the rest of The
Netherlands, the ethnic composition of city areas has continued to change
with the addition of immigrants coming from non-western countries com-
bined to a lesser extent with those from Central Eastern Europe and refu-
gee countries such as Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Furthermore Afrikaanderwijk has many of the characteristics of urban
decline: the unemployment rate is 24%, 27% of people live below mini-
mum income.5
Its housing stock is overwhelmingly old, dilapidated and
cheap stemming from the end of the nineteenth century when it came
into existence and the post-war period from 1950s to 1970s. The area lost
its economic raison d’etre when the harbour and dockyards were moved
to the outskirts of the city. Suffice to say those most hit by the economic
restructuring were blue-collar workers,6
suffering high levels of unemploy-
ment. Those who could afford to leave moved out to the suburbs and so
new groups of immigrants benefited from the drop in housing prices and
growth in housing availability in these areas (Engbersen, Snel, &
Weltevrede, 2005). Afrikaanderwijk is likewise a good example of the
response to this predicament given by many Western European countries,
which is a mushrooming of diverse social and economic policies to com-
bat the seeming irrevocability of these transformations. However, accord-
ing to Wittebrood and Dijk (2007) in the context of Dutch national
policies, these social goals were generally unstated. It was assumed that
changes to the type of housing in particular areas would lead to subse-
quent changes in the population. A key component of housing diversity
policies is the assumption that the new residents from middle or upper
class backgrounds will be able, either through improved social cohesion
(Wittebrood & Dijk, 2007) or increased social capital (Kleinhans,
Priemus, & Engbersen, 2007) to positively impact on the rejuvenated
area. It remains to be seen how much the process of gradual housing
renewal that is currently taking place in Afrikaanderwijk will address
these socio-economic issues.
DEFINING DIVERSITY
Before moving onto a description of my research I think that it’s important
to briefly mention the thorny subject of defining diversity. Unlike in the
American and British context the word race is not a convincing point of

analytical departure. Race relations makes way in the Netherlands for dif-
ferentiations based on ethnicity and increasingly culture. In Europe, immi-
grant groups are ethnically very varied coming from the many former
colonies and actively recruited as labour migrants. In the United Kingdom,
the terms ethnic and racial minorities and ethnic and racial diversity are
frequently used to denote specific groups. Other terms used generally are
refugees, guest workers, economic and political migrants. It is important to
consider that all the terms scholars use to identify a group are labels that
have been developed in a specific historical, political and economic context.
They are not neutral or all encompassing. Who is Dutch depends on how
this is defined: from place of birth, parents birth, cultural socialization, eth-
nic origin and nationality. The term that the Dutch frequently use to distin-
guish between the native population and the rest is: allochtonen, which does
not have an English equivalent but generally means originating from else-
where. In the Dutch national statistics, compiled by the CBS,7
the popula-
tion is divided into non-Dutch/foreign first generation if an individual and
one of his/her parents are born outside The Netherlands. The second gen-
eration consists of individuals born in The Netherlands with at least one
parent born abroad. Within this group there is a further distinction
between western and non-western groups and whether a country is seen as
Western is dependent on how similar its social economic or cultural
arrangement is to The Netherlands.
RESEARCH METHODS
South Rotterdam, particularly Afrikaanderwijk, is not an area I am physi-
cally familiar with; this has both advantages and disadvantages for my role
as researcher. Firstly it has propelled me to include observation in my
research methods as a way of familiarizing myself with the setting. The pur-
pose being to overcome as Lofland calls it, the ‘dilemma of distance’
(Lofland & Lofland, 1995). ‘Be neither discouraged or over-confident about
your relationship to the setting. Whatever the relationship, it is simulta-
neously an advantage and a drawback’ (1995, p. 23). I am hoping to bridge
or get closer through means of observation and spending time in diverse
public spaces available to me and in so doing overcome my own physical
and emic distance to the lived experience of Afrikaanderwijk.
Outcomes derive from in-depth taped interviews of 16 women living in
Afrikaanderwijk in combination with 7 un-taped street interviews. The

women I interviewed ranged in age from 31 to 82 years. The taped conver-
sations lasted between 25 and 45 minutes and allowed me to explore
women’s use and feelings towards public space and social contact. The
street interviews were of shorter duration, lasting 5À10 minutes, and can
be seen as indicatory, building impressions used to give shape to the in-
depth interviews. All in-depth interviews were recorded, transcribed verba-
tim and analyzed through qualitative content analysis and detailed coding
(Lofland & Lofland, 1995).
Joint and single interviews were used in this study to offer the most flex-
ibility in gaining access to people and information. I used joint interviewing
as it helps to establish rapport and an atmosphere of confidence whilst also
enabling the different kinds of knowledge held by each person to be
revealed. Joint interviews produce more complete data as interviewees fill
in each other’s gaps and memory lapses (Edgell, 1980; Seymour, Dix, &
Eardley, 1995) and fit well in a context where women are often to be found
walking in groups. Additional information was obtained by my visits to
Afrikaanderwijk, between 30 and 40 times roughly totalling 1600 hours,
many of these visits were observational, hanging around Afrikaander
Square, some were for pre-arranged interviews some with professionals
working in the area and others were to attend special events like the open-
ing of the teahouse, international women’s day celebrations, a fashion
show, meetings, classes (sewing and Dutch language) the women went to or
had organized. This helped me to validate the stories that the women told
me about their lives and contact patterns and put their observations/experi-
ences into a bigger neighbourhood context.
I must add that I did not ask specific questions on diversity and its impact
on the women’s lives. The reasons for this are twofold: I felt that would be
leading the question, setting up ethnicity to play the lead role. My position
being that if ethnic diversity plays a significant factor in their everyday experi-
ences this would become clear within the course of the interviews. My second
motive for not specifically targeting the ethnic issue is related to the question
of thorny definitions discussed earlier complicated by the fact that there is no
clear consensus amongst academics about how ethnic groups are formed,
which is why I opted for self-definition where possible.
Many of the migrant women I spoke to found it interesting to be inter-
viewed by a fellow migrant and many of the Dutch women were curious
about my Englishness. In this way my dual African-English identity
enabled the women interviewed to prioritize certain ethnic characteristics
and find a way to bond with them. I feel this allowed the women to share
their experiences with me more easily and frankly.

PROFILE INTERVIEWEES
Women who agreed to be interviewed in-depth described their own ethnic
identity. Of the 16 respondents two identified themselves as Surinamese,
seven as Dutch, one as Turkish (1), one as Dutch-Turkish (1), two as
Moroccan (2), two were born in the Antilles and identify as Dutch and one
as Romanian (1). The seven street-interviewed women I categorized as
Somali (1), Moroccan (2), Turkish (3) and Dutch (1). Women whom I spe-
cifically wanted to formally interview I classified as: having some knowl-
edge of the area; Dutch-speaking and public space users themselves. Three
of the sixteen and all of the seven street interviews I approached myself and
occurred spontaneously. The other 13 contacts were obtained via other
people who I had informed of my research and they in turn passed on use-
ful telephone numbers, leaving me to introduce myself.
GETTING IN
Being a middle-aged woman, looking of Caribbean/Mediterranean origin, I
think aided my relative invisibility in this neighbourhood and I took pains
to dress in casual but cared for clothes: jeans and a top. I decided that a
good strategy in the beginning would be to sit in the park in Afrikaander
Square. This would enable me to watch the ebb and flow of people, sample
the atmosphere and put me in the position of being able to hold a few en
passant street interviews. I thought this would be useful in gaining a feel
for how to carry out the full-fledged interviews I was to undertake later.
My colleague (see introduction) who lives in the area had agreed to put me
in contact with some women she knew, women who fit my profile but in
addition I wanted to approach women myself. The fact that I am a middle-
aged woman of African-English descent I felt would allow me to freely
approach and speak to many women in different public spaces during my
fieldwork period. So on 20 May 2010 I went to sit in the park and after 30
minutes of looking around I started to feel very awkward, uncomfortable
and tense. In desperation I wrote in my notebook: ‘well the enormity of the
task ahead has sunk in, how on earth am I going to make contact? without
people running away? am I up to the job?’. Noticing as I wrote a feeling of
calm descending upon me, aha, the way forward had begun. I began writ-
ing what I saw and this was helpful in enabling me to lose a certain awk-
wardness I had and allowed me to feel as if I too belonged in

Afrikaanderwijk. After a while I did not feel uncomfortable sitting and
walking around the park or square or cafe´ on my own any more.
FINDINGS
What follows is the result of my fieldwork research during May 2010 and
June 2012 in and around Afrikaanderwijk. My analysis is centred on a
matrix of interrelated observations divided into three different levels of
information: the what, the where and the who. This resulted in what I have
called the ladder of interaction; the higher up you climb the more intense/
complex the contact levels are and subsequent knowledge of the other.
Beginning at the bottom rung of the ladder with observation and eye con-
tact, the next step is greetings, moving on to chatting, which is divided into
quick and long chats, followed by doing activities together and ending with
hanging out. During the course of my analysis it became clear that the dif-
ferent types of interactions are also spatially informed, concentrated in
semi-public, public and institutional spaces. Compounding these spatially
informed interactions are other differentiations, the ‘with whom’ are the
women interacting. The differentiations most commonly referred to are:
ethnicity, gender, age, proximity (neighbour) and the known or unknown
other.
A LADDER OF INTERACTION
Observation & Eye Contact
When talking to women it becomes clear that many of them used obser-
vation as a way to judge who they could greet. Ans first looks to see if
the other is or is not known before expressly making herself known to
increase her feelings of personal safety, ‘if I see a group of people who I
find a bit scary and I don’t know, but I have to walk past, them I always
say hello’. For Nesrine, ‘when someone looks downwards or cross’ and
for Vanya, ‘if women look at you and then look away hurriedly’, is a
sign that there will be little or no contact, ‘you can see it in someone’s
eyes and how they behave’ Vanya adds. Other women explained how
they use particular spaces for observation to distinguish who is and is
not their neighbour, Marleen’s is a typical example, ‘I know because

I see the same faces go inside and then I think so that’s where they live
and then sometimes in the morning or afternoon I see them again and
they say hello, how are you and I say good and then walk on’. Layla has
a similar strategy, ‘now occasionally I will stand by the front door and
see who walks in and out’.
Greeting
This is for many the ﬁrst point of contact with others. Azra, ‘I greet people
and I make eye contact and everybody greets me back’. Grace, ‘I wave to
women I see from here (school playground) who I also see at the hairdres-
sers’. For Grace having observed someone in one familiar place leads to a
greeting in another local space. For Ans it’s a conscious decision, ‘yes I am
someone who consciously chooses to greet everyone I meet, even if they do
not return the greeting’. Nesrine stated, ‘I greet everyone I see except those
who make it explicit they do not want to be greeted’. Gulnaz noted ‘I greet
automatically I don’t think about it. For example, in the metro or train I
say, good morning and sometimes no one answers’. The ﬁve retired women
at ‘t Klooster8
responded that they only have to step on to the pavement to
meet someone they know who they would also greet.
Reading the responses to observation & eye contact and greetings we can
see a mix of attitudes to making social contact in public space(s). Attitudes
to greeting in general seem fairly positive. Women express their commit-
ment to greeting as a general principle, also as a means of attaining infor-
mation regarding who belongs to the neighbourhood. Others use greetings
to create a sense of familiarity and others do so to enhance their feelings of
public safety. Observation is for some women a way of looking for clues to
see if and when to make contact. The differentiations observed by the
women can result in different greeting behaviour. This aspect will be more
fully explored in the section on ethnic diversity and gender in public
spaces(s) in this essay.
From the responses to questions on the visibility of women on the
streets and other public spaces it is clear that certain women frequent cer-
tain places for differing lengths of time where they evidently engage with
other women in diverse activities. These places are: school entrance areas,
Afrikaander Square, playground areas, the twice weekly market around
Afrikaander Square, pavements in front of residential housing areas. The
activities women take part in or observe other women taking part
in (with or without children) are: watching kids in playgrounds/parks

areas, bringing and picking up children to and from school, sitting and
chatting, eating, cooking, drinking tea, picnicking, shopping, talking and
standing, power walking round the park, learning to ride a bike, stop
and go chatting (quick hello’s quickly moving on) and long chats.
Quick Chat
When I asked where else Vanya saw women she replied, ‘they have a quick
chat in the street, they stop and go on their way to the shops’. Layla
describes when she herself has quick chats in the area, ‘mostly in the eve-
ning if the weather is really nice, then I go and walk by a group of women
standing or walking in the square but its not everyday and if its really nice
and warm I take the kids’. Marleen prefers quick chats, ‘at the front door
or when we are in the garden then we can meet and talk a bit’. Grace
describing her contact history, ‘I gradually began very carefully by having
small conversations, now I know almost everybody’.
Long Chat
Grace, ‘yes I do talk to people here at school. To be honest I am very
talkative and I love the feeling of togetherness. Sometimes we (the
mothers) are here till past three talking to each other’. For Beppie who
has lived in Afrikaanderwijk 24 years its simple, ‘you can talk to people
all day long on the street there, you go to the shops you meet someone,
you start talking’. Doina who is often around Afrikaanderplein in the
afternoons observes, ‘if it’s warm, I last saw groups of women sitting talk-
ing together in the park’. Munevver spots women by Afrikaanderplein,
‘by the market, when they come they look for a nice green spot where
they can sit down together and talk’. Joyce, lives on the other side of
Afrikaanderwijk closer to Bloemhof, what does she notice? ‘I see women
with their kids by the playground … I am not sure if they are family or
friends but they do talk to each other’.
Hanging Out
Hanging out refers to social contact that takes place over an extended
period of time. Were women either move from place to place together,

what Lofland (1975, p. 118) has referred to as the travelling pack, or
when they meet up in, the same space(s) repeatedly.9
Nesrine has
observed, ‘when the kids go to school, then you also see a group, they
come here (the Arendt) because its quiet, they also go to the parents
room at the school or the mosque where at the moment they are having
Koran lessons every morning and evening’. Azra herself belongs to a
group, ‘they sit here on that square. Lots of women come here and their
kids play there. But everybody has their own group. We don’t come
here; they are younger than us and have their own group. We sit between
the buildings; there is a park there with benches. That’s where we go if
its nice weather. We have breakfast there or we have supper there, every-
body brings some food and we eat together’. When I asked more about
the group differences Azra illuminates, ‘they have small kids, ours are
bigger and of course some don’t get on with each other. Me, I say hello
to everyone but my group is the oldies’.
Ans has noted, ‘there are a couple of places, the Parallelweg by the social
housing estates, women sit on the pavement there together eating those
seeds which they then spit out onto the street … that’s totally acceptable,
to them, so you can always tell, where there are a lot of sunflower seeds
there are a lot of women talking together. There is also a play area behind
the Parallelweg by the benches, the women would like more
benches … they often sit there talking to each other and drinking tea out of
a beautiful tea pot’. When I ask her if this happens in her own street, which
is a street which is part of the local housing authorities regeneration
scheme, introducing new housing for owner occupiers, to mix up the social
and economic background of residents, Ans replies ‘where I live they do
not sit on the pavements outside their houses, they are too busy working to
pay off the mortgage’. In Ans response we can read some of the concerns
of the gentrification model as an answer to increasing inner city inequalities
(Wittebrood & Dijk, 2007).
What we have witnessed in the three ascending steps on the ladder of
interaction is women actively engaging in creating warm and friendly
socially public spaces (Mu¨ ller, 2002). This is done individually and as a
group. These group manifestations occur in different areas spread out over
Afrikaanderwijk and the women I spoke to found it easy to provide multi-
ple examples of this type of behaviour. These representations are in stark
contrast to ideas of the cold, anonymous city that women fear. What the
women’s stories strongly depict are women who for various reasons are
making every effort to bond and enjoy the public spaces around them.

INSTITUTIONAL SPACES
In the previous paragraph most of the social contact takes place in the con-
text of semi-public and public space. In addition to the setting where the
type of interaction discussed above is taking place, other spaces also seem
to inspire certain forms of interaction.
During the interviews women mentioned spaces where groups of women
could be found doing stuff together, these locations are what Blokland has
termed institutional spaces, because they are neither private nor public,
‘private or public form a continuum deﬁning the access of an arbitrary indi-
vidual to a social space’ (2003, p. 91). I have chosen to include this infor-
mation because it increases our understanding of women’s social behaviour
in Afrikaanderwijk. These places are semi-public spaces such as the library,
the swimming pool, the sports school, the mosque, the hairdressers, com-
munity centres: ‘t Klooster, de Arendt and the Wooncafe´ , Lekker op Zuid
(a cafe´ ) and the Tea House on Afrikaander square. When applying the lad-
der of interaction, these spaces are distinguished by long chats, activities
and in some cases hanging out.
Doina, ‘me I feel at home here (cafe´ Lekker op Zuid) because the owner
is ex-Yugoslavian its close to my own culture … and when I ﬁrst came here
I had a cup of coffee and started talking to Bo. Sometimes she can be a bit
sad and sometimes I am, we recognise common experiences, this is such a
place … even if I am busy I come here. I feel safe here’. Layla also recog-
nizes a group, ‘they are never alone, they are always together by the mos-
que, they used to come here (the Arendt) to join in activities, but during
Ramadan they stop … they are always in a group on Afrikaander Square
by the tea house’. Munevver is busy organizing activities at the new
Vestia10
community centre, where women come for meetings, activities, lan-
guage lessons, sport and yoga. She argues, ‘we got this space for meetings,
for talking to people, for the elderly and also for the tea house … lots of
things happen here (Afrikaanderwijk), the kids go to school, there’s the
library, the swimming baths … because these are places the women go to.
We also go to the Arendt for Zumba’. Gulnaz sharing her recent experi-
ences at the same Wooncafe´ remarks on all the activities she has organized
there for the women in the area, ‘now there is almost something to do every
day, Monday we have Dutch lessons, Tuesday night we have sport,
Wednesday we have games evening where small kids play board games
with their parents, other organisations also hold events here’. Asking Azra
where she feels at home she says, ‘outside my house? That would be in the

park, behind here and in the Wooncafe´ ’. And last but not least the elderly
retired women who frequent t’ Klooster: Beppie, Truus, Loes Yvonne and
Gerda, who have made this community centre a second home, spending a
lot of their days together chatting, sharing problems and doing activities.
Their contact patterns revolve around their relationship with each other
that takes place in the community centre. These examples illustrate how the
value of institutional spaces facilitates a warm feeling, a sense of belonging
a place to be at home with others. Places where women feel
comfortable being publically kind of private together. For some residents
this is the best way to make contact with others.
SEMI-PUBLIC SPACE EXPERIENCES
In contrast to institutional spaces, that are characterized by their very phy-
sicality, their presence in the neighbourhood landscape, the women often
mentioned another type of semi-public space where contact experiences are
built-up. These spaces are ones that are often hidden away from the public
gaze. Furthermore they are often associated with points of possible conflict,
irritation, danger and coldness in both the literal and figurative sense. They
are the transition spaces residents move through on the journey to and
from their own private living spaces and other more public spaces. In
spaces such as the waiting area for the lift, in the lift, or hall, stairwell, gal-
lery, corridor, porch, women report predominantly engaging in greetings
and quick chats. These spaces also enable the women to distinguish who
their neighbour (known other) might be. For all the women, with the
exception of Gulnaz, these spaces have led to positive experiences with their
neighbours. Functioning as non-threatening and non-intrusive places of
easy contact. The intrinsic differentiating element in this type of semi-
public space is the lack of control; there is no staff or personnel who could
ostensibly police/ensure nothing untoward happens. Joyce declares, though
she is a very busy person, ‘but I spend a lot of time talking by the entrance
downstairs’. When I ask Grace how many of her neighbours she greets, she
replies, ‘the whole block, not all at the same time but generally, when I go
down the stairs I see someone and when I go up the stairs I see someone’.
Beppie mentions how on her floor they all wait for each other to go down
in the lift. Beppie also has a knocking ritual with one of her neighbours to
check if everything is all right. Azra uses the gallery in her flat to round
people up for her activities at the Wooncafe. The enclosed and yet neutral

character of these hidden away spaces facilitate a kind of friendliness
among these women.
ETHNIC DIVERSITY, GENDER AND PUBLIC SPACE
In this section I will present a picture of how women experience living in
their hyper ethnically diverse neighbourhood. I have categorized these
responses into contact with the neighbours (known other) and others
(unknown other). Starting with the later (unknown other) let us consider
what the oldest group of residents, who are all ethnically Dutch, white and
working class, have to say. Beppie, ‘we talk to each other and they talk to
each other, we are all very sociable people here’. The ‘we’ is the small group
of roughly six or seven Dutch white women she hangs out with in the cen-
tre; the ‘they’ are the Turkish women who also use the centre. Later on
Guus adds, ‘so much has changed, some have died and the other people,
how do I say that? Dutch foreigners, you don’t really see them … and we
don’t really talk to them anywhere’. However not everybody in the group
of ﬁve agreed with her on this point. Beppie points out, ‘but on Tuesday
afternoon we have all the women, the foreign women’, whom she at least
greets, ‘they come and sit in here, they have something to drink and then
we talk and I say good afternoon and then I say it again in Turkish!’
Doina, our local observer who enjoys sitting at cafe´ ‘Lekker op Zuid’,
overlooking Afrikaander Square, watching the world go by notices that
communication is good between women in the area, only it seems to be
along ethnic lines, ‘that’s what I am working on now, trying to set up a
project in Feijenoord11
that brings different groups together … my idea is
to ask three hairdressers to stand on a podium, a Moroccan, an Aruban
and Dutch and everybody can have their hair cut but the Turkish hairdres-
ser cuts an Aruban, the Dutch hairdresser cuts a Turk, so very simple’. She
adds, ‘I have had contact with people from a lot of different cultures so I
can understand the women here’. Doina’s own difﬁcult experiences of mak-
ing social contact centre around local Dutch people, ‘I communicate differ-
ently from Dutch people, I can communicate better with other ethnic
minorities. My way is different, my attitude towards feelings, you can
sometimes cry. Here everything is very clinical and the only emotion you
can have is laughter and it’s easier to watch SBS612
than to make eye con-
tact with someone’. Continuing, ‘they do greet, but it’s so reserved that you
cannot have any further contact’.

Gulnaz, ‘I wanted to encourage Dutch women to use it (the Wooncafe)
as well. There used to be a special coffee morning for the Dutch women
but then something happened, I think they fell out with each other because
they stopped coming. I don’t know why. So via a bingo night I am getting
more Dutch women to come again. We’ve been doing it a few months now,
they love bingo and bit by bit the group is getting bigger’. Ans, ‘I have
Dutch parents and grandparents but since I moved here I feel really, really
Dutch. It’s because of my environment. So many people from so many
nationalities that I feel like an ethnic minority’.
When it comes to neighbourly contact (known other) ethnic differences
reveal differing expectations. Azra who has lived in Afrikaanderwijk 35
years, reports ‘look I don’t want contact with everyone, just hallo mostly
with Dutch people, they don’t want you in their house. They never ask, if
someone comes to my front door I always say: come in, come in. But they
never do. They talk at the door so I just say hello, they never ask me to
come in. That’s what they are like’. When I ask her about friendliness, she
says ‘yes they are friendly only they have never learnt to say: come inside.
We are different, always asking, come inside please take a seat. I make con-
tact with Turkish women, I know them all and I’ve got a lot of friends. We
do stuff together, like going to the market or eating together. That kind of
thing’.
Munevver’s neighbours are mixed, ‘at the moment I’ve only got three
neighbours, ‘cos they are demolishing this building and a lot of people have
already left. We had close contact with our neighbours from Suriname,
Turkey and Morocco, we were like family’. Adding, ‘I adapt to all cultures,
languages and people. I respect everybody and their beliefs. I feel Turkish
and also Dutch because I grew up here, I was four when I came here. At
home I also cook food from all kinds of different cultures’.
Gulnaz says of her neighbours, ‘here, its mostly Turkish that live in this
area. Turkish people and I am not sure where they come from if its
Suriname, Cape Verdi or the Antilles, I can’t tell the difference, well a bit.
Recently some Moroccans and Chinese have also moved into our block of
ﬂats, but they keep themselves to themselves’. She later clariﬁed who kept
themselves to themselves and why. ‘Mostly a few half sentences in Dutch,
they don’t want to make contact and mostly they work hard so they don’t
feel like it. And they mostly work in Chinese restaurants’.
Ans explains that when she bought her house she was told, ‘that one
third of the owners would be Turkish, one third Surinamese and one third
Dutch’. However, ‘when we actually moved in it turned out that Dutch
people made up only 5% of the buyers. You look around and think, these

people aren’t Dutch and they are mostly the people who are motivated to
organize and get things done’. She wants to live in a mixed neighbourhood
and not where predominantly Turkish people live, ‘it sounds bad but I
hope that more Moroccan, Surinamese and Antillean people move into the
area otherwise it will become a ghetto here’.
Perhaps the thoughts of the retired women on neighbourly contact can
give some insight into some of the sentiments expressed above. When it
comes to neighbourly contact they maintain the following line, ‘we greet
each other, but we don’t go in for coffee, we drink coffee here’ because,
‘the neighbours stay the neighbours’. These responses reveal different social
contact cultures and expectations. For one making contact is an opportu-
nity to invite the other into the home setting to feel more comfortable. For
the other it is the opposite, feeling comfortable is doorstep talking.
From the stories women have told, we start to get a picture of an area
where ethnicity plays an important role. For many women a Muslim iden-
tity and culture are the framework of their local setting. For some women
it is particularly the Muslim identity and for others the cultural identity.
There is an awareness of the otherness of the other and in some cases the
otherness of themselves, a Dutch identity becomes other in a context where
diversity predominates.
Differentiations of gender like ethnicity cut across a lot of the current
interaction practices in Afrikaanderwijk. These differentiations cannot be
seen as separate for ethnic experiences are gendered experiences as the fol-
lowing examples plainly demonstrate. Vanya observes, ‘some (women)
don’t want you to say hello, some don’t like it’ upon asking why this would
be so she asserts, ‘their men do not allow them to look interested in con-
tact’. Vanya says of herself, ‘I am also Muslim but not so strict … you see
it a lot but I don’t get involved, I leave well alone otherwise er … because
you see I come from the north of The Netherlands, its very different there,
only Dutch people in Groningen. When you come here there are so many
different cultures, there it’s different they are more friendly en that’s why I
still miss it’. Vanya reasons, ‘because these people are born here, they came
here from their own country and only know city life, but I have lived in
other places’.
Layla explaining her own contact behaviour with men argues, ‘I do, yes,
I do greet men I know but it’s easier with women because of our traditions.
I am from an Islamic country and that’s why greeting men is not easy’. She
can only greet men she knows. ‘I can’t walk around saying hello, hello to
men because they will think that I want something from them’. Azra
too makes the point that she would only talk to a man if she had something

to say, not a casual greeting because she would worry about others’ percep-
tions. She is allowed to talk to male family members in public, ‘yes my
nephew and my uncle this kind of relationship’. Gulnaz too states, ‘depend-
ing on the person, greeting men in our culture is a bit not good, no defi-
nitely not, they will start to think, why is she greeting me? Or they will feel
ashamed and look away’. Her own behaviour she does however modify
depending on the circumstances, ‘but if somebody looks at me I greet
them, man or women it doesn’t matter. Sometimes you get a lot of men
here to repair stuff then I say good morning or afternoon’. Nesrine, Layla
and Renzia also are happy to exempt themselves regularly from this tradi-
tion, not believing that to greet men dishonours them personally.
Ans gender considerations are more instrumental, ‘I have a lot of con-
tact with women but it’s not because of my preferences, but those of the
women in this area to do things together’, ‘to be honest I hardly know any
men in this area that I talk to apart from the only Dutch elderly man living
in the flat among all the Turkish people who wants to leave, I talk to him’.
Ans notes how the effects of these norms have also curtailed the role of the
Wooncafe´ , ‘if we let men into the Wooncafe´ then half of the women would
leave, more than half would leave!’
It is clear that women experience the Turkish community as the domi-
nant group in the area and this brings with it certain cultural requirements.
Some women are able to adapt to this situation, some struggle with it,
some do not even question it and some fight it. This is also true for women
I spoke to who are from the Turkish community themselves.
Generational and cultural differentiations crosscut considerations per-
taining to gender, ethnic differentiations and social contact in this area.
Munevver’s observations on the behaviour habits of older Moroccan
women are a case in point, ‘I’ve noticed that the older women well they
stay, they stay in their own group, they make contact but only a bit’. She
says, ‘maybe it’s because the men don’t allow it, I don’t really know what
their home situation is like, but young Moroccan woman are much freer’.
Interestingly Joyce, who does not have the same gender considerations,
often casually greets men in the area around her house, ‘you have different
cultures here although the majority of people have a Muslim background. I
talk to most people and on some moments its men. Because the women,
yes where I live is predominantly Muslim and the men are often by the cof-
fee house and almost everyday I run into them first. I only talk to
the women if I attend their activities, at the community centre Oleander,
some of the women go there and that’s where we make contact’. Here we
can see how Joyce’s locally acquired knowledge about how and where to

make contact with these specific women. We can also understand the value
of institutional spaces for local social patterns.
Furthermore what this section on ethnic differentiations and gender
plainly demonstrates is how the human lived experience of these categori-
zations is multi-layered and complex. The barriers to social contact
are for some only related to the private domain while for others the
opposite holds, in that in private and institutional spaces they are free to
make social contact frowned upon in public space. Whilst other women
are free and happy to be publically private in the parks and playgrounds
spread across Afrikaanderwijk. The women in my study have learnt to
code and give meaning to interactions themselves, negotiating their own
experiences with others while interpreting these interactions based on a
framework of their own meanings collected over time. By doing so they
renegotiate a space between the highly politicized integration discourse
and themselves.
CONCLUSION
Women are still making social contact in Afrikaanderwijk; they particularly
seem to be doing so with other women living in the neighbourhood.
Neighbourly contact is seen as valuable and takes many forms from hang-
ing out to observation. Ethnic diversity here has generated a multiplicity of
public space use. It has not led to a withdrawal from community engage-
ment, in fact the credo seems to be, if you do not get involved you get left
behind. Women are transforming certain public spaces into what Lofland
(1975) calls home territories. Another interesting feature of this enquiry has
been the discovery of interaction codes used by women predominantly to
make and understand the contact codes of other women. This has been of
great interest to me as it goes against the decline of community thesis argu-
ments, pointing the way to new forms of engagement based on locality and
not on community. Ethnicity diversity has led to a greater diversity in con-
tact traditions and spaces. This study of gender in relation to many of the
contemporary urban changes has attempted to understand the impact of
these transformations on socio-spatial identities. In this sense, this research
embodies de Certeau’s (1984) dual city model, where one city is the one
laid out rationally and defined in terms of city planners, developers and sta-
tisticians. While the other city, the second exists in the practice of everyday
life, a representational space within which a mass of transitory fleeting and

fortuitous interactions take place and translate into our own inner emo-
tional life.
What we find in these women’s practices are the offsetting of these
rational stories with their own personal emotionally owned experiences of
space. Experiences that diverge quite markedly from these national and
media-related narratives. Ultimately this case study reveals another frame
of reference, one where gender and ethnicity are dynamic, being explored
and in flux against a backdrop of urban changes social, spatial, political
and economic. Above all this study contrasts markedly with a tendency to
categorize women and public space use in terms of: fear (violence/rape),
cold/impersonal (decline of community) and problems/passivity (migrant
neighbourhoods). What I have witnessed here are women as active strate-
gizing people altering their socio-spatial environment thereby creating bet-
ter neighbourhood support networks and ultimately increasing their own
connections to the space and people they live around. Working on creating
a social climate where they and the women are in the process of connecting
with can feel at home.
NOTES
1. Called Afrikaanderplein officially or Afriplein by the locals. In the rest of this
chapter I refer to it as Afrikaander Square.
2. Crimson Architectural Historians, Dorman, E., Provoost, M., & Vanstiphout, W.
(December 2007).
3. According to the BIRD classification system used by COS Rotterdam
(Centre for research & Statistics in Rotterdam), http://rotterdam.buurtmonitor.nl/
4. According to scholars (Musterd, 2003; Lucassen & Penninx, 1997) up until
the 1960s The Netherlands was characterized by a period of emigration.
5. COS, http://rotterdam.buurtmonitor.nl/
6. Goldthorpe, Lockwood, Bechhofer, and Platt (1969).
7. The Dutch National Statistics Bureau, http://www.cbs.nl/nl-NL/menu/home/
default.htm
8. The community centre on Afrikaander Square.
9. What Lofland sees as part of the creation of home territories. A home terri-
tory refers to how a relatively small area of public space becomes ‘a home away
from home’.
10. Vestia is a housing association, providing inexpensive rentable
accommodation.
11. Afrikaanderwijk is a district in Feijenoord, South Rotterdam.
12. Is a commercial television provider, specializing in emotional-tv programmes.

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