Scholars have been increasingly interested in how everyday interactions in various places with people from different ethnic/religious background impact inter-group relations. Drawing on representative surveys in Leeds and Warsaw (2012), we examine whether encounters with ethnic and religious minorities in different type of space are associated with more tolerance towards them. We find that in Leeds, more favourable affective attitudes are associated with contact in institutional spaces (workplace and study places) and socialisation spaces (social clubs, voluntary groups, religious meeting places); however, in case of behavioural intentions - operationalised as willingness to be friendly to minority neighbours - only encounters in socialisation spaces play a significant role in prejudice reduction. In Warsaw, people who have contacts with ethnic and religious minorities in public (streets, park, public services and transport) and consumption spaces (cafés, pubs, restaurants) express more positive affective attitudes towards them, but only encounters in consumption space translate into willingness to be friendly to minority neighbours.

‘Social frontiers’ – places of sharp difference in social/ethnic characteristics between neighbouring communities – have largely been overlooked in quantitative research. Advancing this nascent field first requires a way of identifying social frontiers in a robust way. Such frontiers may be ‘open’ – an area may contrast sharply with a neighbourhood in one direction, but blend smoothly into adjacent neighbourhoods in other directions. This poses some formidable methodological challenges, particularly when computing inference for the existence of a social frontier, an important goal if one is to distinguish true frontiers from random variation. We develop a new approach using Bayesian spatial statistical methods that permit asymmetries in spatial effects and allow for spatial autocorrelation in the data. We illustrate our method using data on Sheffield and find clear evidence of ‘open’ frontiers. Permutations tests and Poisson regressions with fixed effects reveal compelling evidence that social frontiers are associated with higher rates of crime.

Postcolonial theory has tended to focus on those spaces where European colonialism has had a territorial and political history. This is unsurprising, as much of the world is in this sense ‘postcolonial’. But not all of it. This article focuses on Poland, often theorised as peripheral to ‘old Europe’, and explores the application of postcolonial analyses to this ‘other’ place. The article draws upon reflections arising from a study of responses to ethnic diversity in Warsaw, Poland. In doing so we conclude that postcolonialism does indeed offer some important insights into understanding Polish attitudes to other nationalities, and yet more work also needs to be done to make the theoretical bridge. In the case of Poland we propose the ‘triple relation’ be the starting point for such work.

This paper focuses on the neglected issue of encounters with difference within the context of family life at a moment in time when families are increasingly characterised by dissimilarity as a product of mobility and individualisation. The study upon which this paper is based involved both a survey of social attitudes (survey n = 3021) and qualitative multi-stage research (n = 60). The evidence of the findings is that intra-familial diversity does produce more positive attitudes in public life towards the specific social group that an individual family member is perceived to represent. However, such positive attitudes are not translated beyond this specific 'difference' to challenge wider prejudices towards other groups. As such, this research contributes to literatures on geographies of encounter and the geographies of family life by exposing the limits of intimate contact with difference in changing the way social relationships are lived in the wider world.

Economic inequality, international migration and urban transformation have generated fresh interest in segregation and given new social significance to questions of socio‐spatial separation and interaction. At the same time, advances in data, methods and theory are opening up new avenues of inquiry that push the focus beyond simple measures of unevenness of residential patterns towards more nuanced analysis of spatial asymmetry, structure and scale. There is also a drive towards considering spaces and activities outside the neighbourhood, bringing new richness to our understanding of how various social groups interact in the various aspects of their lives. These processes and complexities form the backdrop for our special issue and we reflect on the implications for future priorities in research on segregation in the twenty first century.