This book is about the city of Amsterdam. The city has always been associated with (international) migration, even though the rate of immigration has fluctuated over time. Amsterdam has become what it is today in large part due to immigrants’ hard labour, entrepreneurial drive and financial capital. Oddly enough, this is hardly reflected in academic research. While an abundance of studies on the ‘integration’ of immigrants highlight how immigrants enter the mainstream (a process that slowly but surely takes place), the city itself and its social institutions have usually been treated as givens, as if they were part of the scenery. How immigrants have influenced urban progress has rarely been touched upon. By examining the mutual influencing of immigrant integration and urban change in a diversity of domains, this book should fill this gap. Most of the contributors to this volume are or have been affiliated with the University of Amsterdam. Some are well-versed in post-migration studies, others are specialists in other fields of research, but all share an interest in the nexus of urban development and immigrant ethnic diversity. We met several times to discuss the progress of this endeavour and, in doing so, helped foster the quality and coherence of the book. Takeo David Hymans did the linguistic editing with utmost care, and we are grateful for this contribution to the book. Finally, and regrettably, one of the authors passed away during the editing process, Cees Cortie. We would like to express our sympathy to the next of kin and dedicate this book to him as a token of our appreciation of his scientific work.

Neo-liberal policies and institutional changes have produced a huge and growing number of people with sufficiently common experiences to be called an emerging class. In this book Guy Standing introduces what he calls the Precariat - a growing number of people across the world living and working precariously, usually in a series of short-term jobs, without recourse to stable occupational identities or careers, stable social protection or protective regulations relevant to them. They include migrants, but also locals. Standing argues that this class of people could produce new instabilities in society. They are increasingly frustrated and dangerous because they have no voice, and hence they are vulnerable to the siren calls of extreme political parties. He outlines a new kind of good society, with more people actively involved in civil society and the precariat re-engaged. He goes on to consider one way to a new better society -- an unconditional basic income for everyone, contributed by the state, which could be topped up through earned incomes. This is a topical, and a radical book, which will appeal to a broad market concerned by the increasing problems of labour insecurity and civic disengagement.

The authors wish to thank Christina Norman for the conscientious detail with which she assisted us on various administrative tasks during the beginning phases of this book project. The authors also wish to thank Sharon Panulla and Anna Tobias at Springer for their helpfulness and responsiveness throughout the process. Thanks also to Steven Rogelberg (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) for putting us in touch with Sharon. Finally, Doug Maynard would like to thank Amanda Maynard for her continued support and insights, beginning with the lunch date in graduate school in 1997 that initially inspired my interest in the topic.