Living Together

The closing chapter presents an explanation for the durability of Riverwest’s social diversity that centers on local culture and everyday processes of difference negotiation. It discusses the implications of these processes for inequality, power relations, and popular and scholarly understandings of the “good” community. In Riverwest, place grounds a shared rubric for neighborhood interactions that facilitates boundary-blurring processes—processes that can grind down the categorical boundaries erected to distance and exclude. This chapter revisits the paradoxes of integration and explores the productive possibilities of conflict. Finally, it contemplates what is required to make diversity work.