Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from a public housing area in Copenhagen, this article explores how dwelling, spatiality, materiality, sociality, and the senses interplay and inform different qualities of neighbor relations. Starting from the individual home space and moving to the space of the stair-case shared with other residents who live next door, below, or above, the article argues that neighbor relations constitute a practical embodied experience of the neighborhood. The article describes the condition of dwelling related to home as bestowing a certain embodied dimension to neighborhood relations. Furthermore, the article illustrates near-dwelling, or living near, as one distinctive context for neighbor relations, which involve material and sensorial aspects of neighboring. The article concludes that spatiality and materiality may condition yet not determine the nature of social relations among neighbors.

Many scholars have turned to neighboring, or neighbor interactions and practices, as an open-ended process rather than a finished ideal. In doing so, they have disrupted the romanticization of the neighborhood as a community-driven and stable space. Through this lens, the proximity of dwelling is seen just as a possibility for social contact rather than a crucial characteristic of neighbor relations. Amid the rapid transformations in contemporary urban environments, neighbor relations as spatial practices are shaped and mediated by multiple forces. Based on five research cases from Brazil, Denmark, Finland, and Russia, this Special Issue, "Materialities and Senses of Neighboring," explores how neighbor relations are shaped by material and sensory practices in the context of urban housing and localities. This editorial introduction to this Special Issue of Space and Culture highlights the main points of how the foregrounding of material and sensory aspects contributes to the studies of neighbor relations. It then shows how the cross-cutting themes of shared materiality, housing geometry, sensoriality, and imaginaries interplay in the contributors' articles to develop the overarching idea of the collection.

The neighbourhood of Sofielund in Malm. is marked by diversity in terms of its population and its varying architecture and types of housing. It is also marked by social divisions, including poverty, housing exploitations and criminality. Over time, a large number of interventions have been implemented to better the situation. The interventions are, among other things, inspired by the Business Improvement District (BID) model and include efforts to enhance social cohesion through a strategy of “opening up Sofielund” through creating “meeting-places.” The article provides an analysis of the lived experiences of residents in Sofielund, and shows how policy efforts on “social cohesion” and the creation of meeting-places are perceived by residents. The presentation argues that while meeting-places aim to even out tensions and strengthen social cohesion, they may also reproduce existent power relations and increase tensions. Consequently, the article shows that strategies of opening up places can have the unintended consequences of closing down for buildings, people, and social relations. The article focuses on how inequality and exclusion unfold in inclusive spaces, and entail different forms of polarisation based on “us” and “them”.

The purpose of this article is to contribute to a refined perspective on how the practices of everyday life can challenge existing spatial scale relations, as well as produce new ones, and how this in turn can be addressed by planning. The investigation is based on a discussion of empirical studies dealing with the role of migrants in processes of place-making and urban transformation. In the article, we look particularly at how migrants challenge more established scale relations of certain places and cities in Nordic countries. We illustrate how cases of heterogenic place-making contest established urban scales such as the home, the neighbourhood and the city, and suggest a series of modalities that may be used in the context of urban planning and design, to describe and study these processes in greater detail. The modalities include the notions of extension and compression, up- and downscaling, side-stepping and a multiple order of scales.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore problematisations of urban diversity in urban and integration policies in Denmark and Sweden; the paper aims to show how such policies express social imaginaries about the self and the other underlying assumptions of sameness that legitimise diverging ways of managing urban diversity and (re)organising the city. Design/methodology/approach Inspired by anthropology of policy and post-structural approaches to policy analysis, the authors approach urban and integration policies as cultural texts that are central to the organisation of cities and societies. With a comparative approach, the authors explore how visions of diversity take shape and develop over time in Swedish and Danish policies on urban development and integration. Findings Swedish policy constructs productiveness as crucial to the imagined national sameness, whereas Danish policy constructs cultural sameness as fundamental to the national self-image. By constructing the figure of "the unproductive"/"the non-Western" as the other, diverging from an imagined sameness, policies for organising the city through removing and "improving" urban diverse others are legitimised. Originality/value The authors add to previous research by focussing on the construction of the self as crucial in processes of othering and by highlighting how both nationalistic and colour-blind policy discourses construct myths of national sameness, which legitimise the governing of urban diversity. The authors highlight and de-naturalise assumptions and categorisations by showing how problem representations differ over time and between two neighbouring countries.