Segregation along lines of race/ethnicity and class has created multi-ethnic and rather class-homogeneous neighbourhoods in various European cities, commonly labelled as 'disadvantaged'. Such neighbourhoods are often seen as 'lacking' community, as local networks are crucial for belonging and mixed neighbourhoods are too diverse to provide homogeneous identifications. However, in contrast to the understandings of the sociology of community, people might still experience 'belonging', yet in different ways. This article argues that we have to focus on the under-researched 'time in-between' (Byrne, 1978), the absent ties that Granovetter (1973) pointed to, to understand belonging, while moving away from a conception of the anonymous city and from the urban village. This article explores how absent ties affect belonging by empirically sustaining the notion of public familiarity: both recognizing and being recognized in local spaces. Using regression models on survey data from two mixed neighbourhoods in Berlin, Germany, we analyse the importance of neighbourhood use for public familiarity as well as how it relates to residents' comfort zone: people's feeling of belonging and their sense that others would intervene on their behalf. Our findings indicate that research on neighbourhoods could benefit greatly from a careful consideration of the 'time in-between'.

Policy makers tend to think that residential ‘mixing’ of classes and ethnic groups will enhance social capital. Scholars criticize such ‘mixing’ on empirical and theoretical grounds. This article argues that the critics may focus too much on neighbourhoods. Mixing within neighbourhood institutions might work differently, we argue, drawing on data from a mixed school in Berlin, Germany. While class boundaries are constructed, we also find class-crossing identifications based on setting-specific characteristics, highlighting the setting’s importance and the agency of lower/working and middle-class parents. Parents create ties for exchanging setting-specific resources: child-related social capital. Institutional neighbourhood settings can hence be important for boundary work and social capital. Criticism of social capital and social mix should not overlook the role of networks for urban inequality.

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Local settings have not been central to the debate on educational inequality. If researchers have taken neighborhoods into account, they have focused on (social) compositions, peer group effects, or school access. Yet I draw on interviews and observations at two Berlin schools to suggest that neighborhoods are also important as they shape the organizational practices of teachers and other educational professionals. Combining a Bourdieusian perspective and new institutional theory, I show how local settings become important as social, symbolic, and administrative units. As such, neighborhoods structure the interplay of institutional pressures and objective power relations both within and between schools. This perspective not only allows for a better understanding of the processes producing educational inequality; it also highlights that institutional changes might play out differently in different contexts, with consequences for neighborhood inequality in the field of education and beyond.