European urban neighbourhoods are reshaped by migration, gentrification, and social mix policies, producing complex superdiverse environments. While diversity is often described as mundane and convivial, it remains structured by power and exclusion. This raises critical questions about how distinctions persist and take spatial form amid apparent indifference to ethnic and racial difference. Drawing on Lamont and Molnar’s theory of symbolic boundaries, this article examines how boundary-making operates in superdiverse neighbourhoods. It extends Lamont’s framework by introducing a spatial perspective, showing that symbolic boundaries are not only discursive but embedded in the built environment, and also materialised through perceptions of ‘places’ and ‘amenities for people like me’. Based on walking interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Lower-Molenbeek and Matonge (Brussels), I make a twofold argument. First, in diverse urban contexts, symbolic boundaries persist but are fluid and continually renegotiated through lifestyle – a set of practices, habits, and preferences through which individuals express their identities, social positions, and group affiliations in everyday life that correspond to race, ethnicity, class, religion and intersection between them. Second, symbolic boundaries are not weakened by superdiversity; instead, spatial embeddedness intensifies, localises, and redefines them in specific ways, making boundary-making a key resource for navigating everyday urban life.
Hannah Weytjens (Wed,) studied this question.