The previous chapter revealed that bringing public professionals and citizens together is not sufficient in itself for integration because discussing substantive issues is a social process strongly intertwined with their relationships. This chapter turns to how they build and maintain their relationships by constantly making connections between a great number of people, policies and problems, although the potential connections far exceed the prospects of actually doing so. As Margreet (the area manager from Amsterdam who we met in Chapter Four) states in the opening quote, “it all depends on the relationships that you build up … [and] how you get [local] actors into a conversation and keep them talking”. Building and maintaining relationships requires much more than a mutual commitment to empowerment. Of course, their encounters would be futile if public professionals and citizens did not recognise each other as valuable partners or were not willing to invest in social bonding. However, making connections is far from straightforward, since public professionals and citizens enact regimes of competence which stir up countless emotional and functional needs that motivate collaboration, while at the same time bringing about many tensions, barriers and misunderstandings that frustrate their relationships. Therefore, they need the capacity to communicate about how to enact cooperative styles of relating: in other words, ways of empowering each other to participate in discussions, take decisions and act on problems.

In Glasgow, public professionals and citizens try to improve their relationships by converting each other to what each one of them considers to be ‘genuine’ collaboration rather than exploring what they themselves actually mean by collaboration or practical ways of integrating their different interpretations. In contrast, public professionals and citizens in Amsterdam approach each other by converging and clashing about the functional and emotional grounding of their relationships, which, as a result, do not often stabilise or yield structural changes. Having experienced new types of relationships, public professionals and citizens in Bologna keep a distance from each other by not developing their relationships beyond formal rules and roles.