Comparing Responses to Ethnic Segregation in Urban Europe

Urban ethnic segregation varies across and within European countries. Segregation is decried by many scholars and policy-makers, accepted by others and ignored by some. A most-similar-case comparison of three national and six local German, Dutch and Belgian cases between the mid 1970s and the early 2000s demonstrates that authorities differed on how they viewed and reacted to the segregation of migrant and migrant-origin residents. Their disparate responses stemmed not from actual levels of segregation but from differences in the ways that segregation was conceived, in the emphases given to broader structural or political-cultural integration policies and in the degree to which they provoked or defused ethnic conflict and anti-migrant political mobilisation. Everywhere, attempts to combat segregation gradually gave way to—or at least made room for—efforts to mitigate the undesirable social costs associated with them.