ABSTRACT
The starting point of the research was my dissatisfaction with the low number of studies that truly reflect our increasingly diverse urban societies by studying upwardly mobile ethnic minorities. Other authors have likewise criticised that in much of the research on transformations in cities, ethnic minorities are not seen as agents of urban change (Hall 2015; Schiller and Çağlar 2009). On the one hand, studies on suburbanisation, re-urbanisation, gentrification, practices and boundary-drawing in mixed neighbourhoods have predominantly been based on the native-white middle classes. On the other hand, studies that deal with ethnic minorities have a tendency to homogenise ethnic minorities and portray them as members of the lower classes who live in ethnically and socially segregated neighbourhood and have predominantly ethnically segregated networks. The ethnic minority middling groups are out of focus, even though the children of immigrants are now in their adult lives and many of them have achieved upward mobility.
