The everyday, 'ordinary' citizens, and ambiguous governance affect in Antwerp

Item does not contain fulltextIn Belgium, the rise of the Flemish populist far-right instigated the creation of an affective governance of neighborly interactions and civic dispositions in pluri-ethnic urban spaces. Taking as an extended case the development of a so-called diversity trajectory in Antwerp, this chapter argues that this governance of samenleven (living together) co-opted the populist notion that everyday neighborhood life of 'ordinary people' forms a distinct, authentic realm. This construction of everyday life generates contradictory governmental pushes and pulls - fascination, desire, suspicion, indifference - around different categories of residents and vernacular practices of incorporation, which I describe as an oscillation between Romanticist and Enlightenment affect. As a result, actually existing relations between white working-class and Moroccan-background residents - the residents whom governance actors deemed 'ordinary' and viewed as authentically immersed in neighborhood life - were unintelligible to governance actors as ethical practices in their own right and dismissed as deficient living together