Many contemporary European and North American societies have become increasingly diverse. In particular their cities are marked by a co-existence of people whose life trajectories, preferred and practiced forms of partnership and family, and aspirations differ. One aspect of such diversity is the plurality of ethnic affiliations, cultural preferences and life experiences linked with immigration. While the facts of permanent immigration and increased diversity are nowadays widely recognized, the exact character and the societal impact of these transformations are controversial and in several ways as yet insufficiently understood.
This study investigates, for one dimension of social life, the consequences that arise from the experience of diversity in the living environments of individuals. How does the socio-demographic and cultural diversity of societies affect the social interactions of individuals and groups within them? We investigate this question in one of Europe’s major countries of immigration. With over nine million foreign-born residents, the share of immigrants in Germany is similar to that in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and France, and not much below that in the United States. About one fifth of the country’s inhabitants have immigrated or are the children of immigrants. In some of the big cities more than one third of the population are first and second-generation immigrants. Does this matter for the ways in which urban residents interact, form friendship-ties, trust, or resent others?
1.1 Interaction Versus Withdrawal
In public and often also academic debates, negative predictions of potential consequences of immigration often gain more attention than positive scenarios. Several academic and non-academic observers have voiced worries that an increasing social and cultural diversity of the population of nation states may have disintegrative effects on these societies. Such worries are not new. In some ways they resemble debates about the consequences of urbanisation around the turn of the twentieth century. At that time, the rapid development of large cities, driven by industrialization, was associated with a loss of community—a prediction that did not come true.
In the 1990s, potentially negative consequences of globalisation were a much debated issue. In Germany, Wilhelm Heitmeyer and other scholars asked whether cities were losing their traditional ‘integrative potential’. Given the pressures of an increasing socio-economic polarisation and spatial segregation along socio-demographic and ethnic lines (Heitmeyer et al. 1998: 9; Anhut and Heitmeyer 2005; Anhut and Heitmeyer 2000), society seemed under threat of losing the capacity to cope with the heterogeneities and conflicts associated with immigration. In this literature, immigration-related diversity was seen as one dimension of stress or disadvantage, and worries centred on the effects of an assumed trend towards the spatial concentration of multiple disadvantages (Anhut and Heitmeyer 2000: 44–45). As urban sociologist Jens Dangschat (1998: 81–82, 84) suggested, in situations of insecurity and competition, contact would lead to more negative stereotypes and increased conflict. Multi-cultural co-existence could then only be the exception.
In Britain, ‘community cohesion’ emerged as a key policy concern and academic buzz word in response to disturbances in some north English towns in 2001 and the 2005 London bomb attacks (see Lowndes and Thorp 2011; Flint and Robinson 2008: 2–3). Here as well, ethnic diversity was associated with divisions and tensions. Increased interaction between different communities was perceived as an important objective of political intervention.
In the academic debate, the publication of results of the US Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey revived older discussions about the societal consequences of immigration-related and ethnic1 diversity. Based on these data, Robert Putnam (2007) warned that ethnic diversity would, at least in the short term, lead to reduced social solidarity and social capital, lower trust between citizens, and reduced participation in community and political activities. As Putnam (2007: 150–151) argued, ‘inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbours, […] to expect the worst from their community and its leaders’. This concept assumes a causal connection between the extent and variety of social interaction, trust in co-citizens and confidence in the structures of society and politics. Environments marked by ethnic diversity are presumed to be perceived as threatening by their inhabitants which affects social interactions and attitudes, and in consequence ‘social cohesion’. Going back to Blumer’s work in the 1950s, there is a tradition of conflict- or threat-theoretical approaches that emphasize alienation and competition between groups (see for example Blumer 1958; Hero 2003; Giles and Buckner 1993; Bobo and Hutchings 1996).
Neither the fundamental theoretical framework, nor the empirical claims of various disintegration approaches have remained unchallenged. Alejandro Portes and Erik Vickstrom (2011: 472) present alternative views of the origins and benefits of social capital: ‘Mutual trust and bowling leagues [Putnam’s example for associations and a vivid civic life] are nice things to have, but they do not represent a sine qua non for a viable society’. They contend that modern societies do not need homogeneity and communitarianism for an organization of social life that is beneficial to individuals and the collective. Similarly, Craig Calhoun (2002: 161) has emphasized that ‘the social order of a complex, large-scale society, […] is necessarily shaped much more by the mediation of markets, formal organizations, and impersonal communications’ than by interpersonal networks. Thus, even if diversity did indeed negatively affect mutual trust, this would not endanger social life more generally. Barbara Arneil (2010) has pointed out that a decline in trust may be a necessary by-product of a struggle for a more just and less discriminatory society and in that sense a positive development. Others, including for instance Ash Amin, have suggested that co-existence does not lead to conflict but to the normalisation of the presence of strangers. Amin (2013: 4) refers to the ‘habitual negotiation of difference’ that occurs ‘at most times without rancour’.
Social-psychological contact theory in a different way challenges disintegration and threat hypotheses. After decades of research, it is nowadays widely accepted that contact across groups has positive effects on attitudes. As Pettigrew and Tropp concluded, based on hundreds of studies, ‘contact between groups can be effective in reducing prejudice’ (2011: 27; see also Hewstone 2009). Research has for instance shown that positive intergroup contact is associated with more outgroup trust (for example Crisp et al. 2010; Schmid et al. 2014; Tam et al. 2009). While initially Gordon Allport (1954) had proposed that positive effects of contact were dependent on a set of conditions, empirical research now suggests that these conditions are not essential for contact to have positive effects (Pettigrew and Tropp 2011: 67, 169; on negative contact see 185–200; see also Dovidio et al. 2003). Furthermore, as has now been convincingly demonstrated, even indirect contact can have positive effects on individual’s attitudes towards an outgroup (on this secondary transfer effect see Schmid et al. 2014).
Contact theory has so far mainly focused on effects of such encounters and interactions, rather than the conditions leading to their occurrence. Still, it tends to be associated with more optimistic assumptions regarding the ways in which individuals respond to contextual diversity. Contexts marked by diversity can be seen as opportunities for interaction which in turn tends to lead to positive outcomes. The crucial question is whether interaction indeed occurs.
One contribution this study makes to the literature is that it explores to what extent and under what conditions intergroup interaction happens. It thus helps to broaden the perspectives of contact theory. Beyond that, we believe that we can provide a substantial empirically based answer to the controversially debated question of how diversity affects social life. This book outlines the results of both quantitative and qualitative investigations in 50 randomly selected urban neighbourhoods of German cities. The Diversity and Contact-Project aimed to not only to undertake a wide-ranging, systematic empirical enquiry but also to combine different methodological approaches and disciplinary traditions. These are very ambitious aims, and it is up to the readers to decide to what extent we succeeded.
1.2 The Relevance of Neighbourhood Context
Debates about the consequences of immigration-related, or ethnic, diversity on societal integration usually relate to neighbourhoods, sometimes to cities. This study also takes the neighbourhood as its object of study. Taking an ecological or broadly institutionalist approach, we assume that social and institutional contexts importantly shape social life and impact on the behaviour and beliefs of individuals and groups. We assume that, if we are interested in the ways in which individuals experience diversity, their immediate context of living plays an important role.
This is not uncontested. The importance of neighbourhood has been questioned from different perspectives. Clearly, the neighbourhood of classic urban sociology, in which people lived and worked in the same locality, often also marked by a relatively homogeneous socio-cultural milieu, belongs to the past. Already in the 1970s, Barry Wellman and others put forward a ‘community liberated’ argument which ‘contends that non-local, personal network communities flourish’ (Wellman 1996: 348). Against the background of an increasing globalisation and the development of new information and communication technologies, a view of individuals connected regardless of place in a networked society (see for example Castells 1996) gained support.
In migration studies, transnationalism and its emphasis on the border-crossing links retained by immigrants and the transnational fields in which they were living unsettled traditional foci on the local community and shifted attention to social and identitarian links far beyond the local (Glick Schiller et al. 1995; Vertovec 2009; Levitt and Jaworsky 2007). More generally, perceptions of social structures as tied to limited localities, of localised ethnic communities, came under attack. ‘Space is less determinative of strong ties today’, opined Richard Alba and Nancy Denton (2004: 257–258; see also Wimmer 2002: 6; Drever 2004: 1424).
For anthropology, Caroline Bretell notes a ‘general move […] away from bounded units of analysis and localized community studies’ (2008: 121). And yet, in anthropology and urban sociology it is frequently taken more or less for granted that neighbourhoods matter. Ethnographic studies that zoom in on small local contexts may use the local site as a lens through which more general social and cultural developments can be studied, but often they also assume a crucial impact of local specificities on individuals and groups. Thus Berg and Sigona (2013: 352) insist that ‘geography matters fundamentally’ and that the ‘intersection of axes of differences’ plays out differently ‘in particular places’. Some authors insist on the peculiarity of each local (read: city) context (see for example Keith 2005: 10; Berking and Löw 2008). But Berg and Sigona also emphasize that our understanding of ‘how space itself shapes the unfolding of diversity on the ground’ is as yet underdeveloped (2013: 356).
While there is some disagreement as to the relevance of the local, the balance within the academic debate has today altogether shifted towards recognition of the relevance of both global and local influences. Thus Roland Robertson (1995), who popularized the term glocalization, argued that the local had not become obsolete but should be re-conceived as embedded in a new global circumstance. Nina Glick Schiller and Ayse Çağlar, emphasizing the importance of studying ‘the sociospatial dimension of human experience’, point at the ‘mutuality of the global and local’ (Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2011: 64–65, referring to Doreen Massey; see also Amin 2007).
Research interested in social interactions and networks nowadays also accepts a continuing relevance of the immediate spatial context for interpersonal relations (see McPherson et al. 2001; Logan 2012: 514–516). Thus, Gary Bridge, surveying the empirical evidence for the UK, suggests a ‘continued role for the local area in the fostering of close friendship or kinship ties’ (2002: 7). Bridge concludes from the literature that it is not necessarily the closest ties that live close, but that for frequent contacts neighbourhood is still important—alongside colleagues at work. Barry Wellman called on ‘network analysts to bring proximity back into their investigations of community’ (Wellman 1996: 353). Although the neighbourhood ‘no longer dominate[s] most personal networks’ (Plickert et al. 2007: 406), proximity matters for social interactions. Everyday routines are located there; leisure time is spent not too far from people’s homes, meaning that unplanned encounters and many more or less regular interactions are located within limited space. For Germany, studies by Petermann (2002) and Mewes (2009) have shown that a significant share of network members still live relatively close (see also Hennig 2007: 384).
One of the strongest recent pleas for the ‘continuing (if not increasing) significance of place’ comes from Robert Sampson’s Great American City (2012: 24; on the importance of place and space, see also Logan 2012). As he argues, ‘a durable spatial logic organizes or mediates much of social life, with neighborhoods and local communities a key component’ (Sampson 2012: 21). In Sampson’s view, neighbourhoods are ‘important determinants of the quantity and quality of human behavior in their own right’. More specifically, Sampson believes that ‘we react to neighborhood difference, and these reactions constitute social mechanisms and practices that in turn shape perceptions, relationships, and behaviors that reverberate both within and beyond traditional neighborhood borders’ (2012: 21–22). In a way, Sampson re-interprets neighbourhood effects by extending the concept to what is happening between neighbourhoods.
Neighbourhood effects have been the subject of an exploding body of mainly sociological, sometimes criminological, scholarship (Nonnenmacher 2013; Galster 2012; van Ham et al. 2012; Sampson et al. 2002; Massey 2013). In fields often dominated by methodological individualism, this represents a turn towards ecological conditions of individual behaviour. While there is by now an enormous body of research on various neighbourhood effects, their size and relative impact are still far from clear. Van Ham and co-authors are optimistic as regards the existence of such effects but still concede limited understanding: ‘There is little doubt that these effects exist, but we do not know enough about the causal mechanisms which produce them, their relative importance compared to individual characteristics such as education, and under which circumstances and where these effects are important.’ (van Ham et al. 2012: 3) Especially for European countries effects are more doubtful than for the US, possibly because differences between neighbourhoods are less pronounced (see for example Friedrichs et al. 2003; Oberwittler 2007).
Further, most of the neighbourhood effects literature has focused on crime and individual life chances, in particular poverty, labour market, and educational opportunities. The focus of this book is different in that our project is interested in social interactions between residents of particular neighbourhoods (and beyond) and their attitudes to diversity. Possibly, the socio-spatial context affects different outcomes in different ways. As regards social interactions, research investigating whether and how they are influenced by the specifics of local context is limited and presents con...