ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how residents negotiate the opportunity to use urban public space through the organization of encounters. It discerns three groups of residents: immigrant women, the creative class and native Dutch residents, respectively: domesticate space, festivalize space and contest space. The results are encounters that ascertain agonistic, alienating and solidaristic modes of engagement between residents in a superdiverse neighbourhood. Neighbourhood Circle, a participation programme in an Amsterdam neighbourhood, offers its heterogeneous population the opportunity to organize encounters with the aim of bringing and binding people together and reinforce a sense of shared public space. An ethnographic insight in these encounters shows how residents negotiate this opportunity for a 'civic becoming' or 'conviviality'. At times, some residents engage in 'acts of citizenship' where a fundamental relation to their neighbours is enacted – a political becoming. This is galvanized in and through encounters where private and personal concerns and sensibilities are transformed into public issues.
