“Whatever you do, it’s never enough” Third-party professionals and residents in bottom-up community building in Amsterdam’s Kolenkitbuurt

Through a richly nuanced ethnographic account of spaces in the Kolenkitbuurt, Amsterdam West, this thesis seeks to understand the nature of relations between different categories of actors involved in bottom-up urban planning. It examines a misalignment in meanings of ‘community-making’ between governing organisations, residents and third-party professionals within the context of a low-income and ethnically mixed neighbourhood, which has been undergoing significant physical and demographic change. Issues around social cohesion have become prominent in recent years in Dutch neighbourhood development policy approaches because ethnic and cultural diversity is thought to undermine a sense of community between residents. Policy approaches tend to focus on ways of building a sense of cohesion and/or tackling what is considered to undermine it. By contrast, this study explores how policy pulls the concept of social cohesion together with other concepts, such as liveability, participation and integration, to create a complex and highly malleable understanding of what it is to build community. This creates space in which third parties promise to deliver community-building interventions by working closely with residents, based on ideas of inclusive neighbourhood development, but in practice often muddle understandings of how best to intervene. As a result, the power to shape community becomes diffused and further complicates the struggle to define community. Moreover, this thesis contends that there persists an under-examination regarding the position of post-colonial migrant residents in contemporary Dutch society by both governing organisations and third-party professionals. As a result, bottom-up community-making practices such as in the Kolenkitbuurt can serve to exacerbate problems between residents, thereby further dismantling a sense of community rather than building it in.