While Convivencia is a specific historical term that has come to represent an idea of peaceful co-existence, Convivencia: Urban Space and Migration in a Small Catalan Town complicates this simplistic vision. Instead, it shows how convivencia has been and is indeed always conflict-ridden by scrutinising the relations between cultural diversity and social conflicts and considering why some social conflicts are said to be inherently cultural.

It does this through a multi-scalar extended case study of a small town in Northern Catalonia, Spain. Starting from an ethnography, it sheds light on the multiple local-global processes inherent to the social construction of the “migrant problem” and its solutions.

The book analyzes the simultaneously local-global transformation of migration and societies, connecting the local processes of space- and place-making in Salt with the more extensive processes of migration, economic crisis and social transformation, and finally, the responses to these changes from the local society, institutions, and NGOs.