Playing with market boundaries
While border regions remain understudied by urban sociologists, this article focuses on the residential strategies of the French middle class moving to neighbouring Belgian cities. It analyses the determinants and the social effects of their mobility and sheds lights on the role played by the middle class in segregation dynamics that go beyond the national border. Based on interviews conducted with different fractions of the middle classes (n = 33) and actors involved in the construction of residential and migratory trajectories (n = 31), the article analyses three stages of migration (how the project to move is framed, its concrete realisation and the residential and social position obtained at the arrival). Two main results can be put forward: firstly, cross-border migrations tend to reinforce internal divisions within the middle classes because the economic and cultural resources of the lower and the upper middle class cannot circulate as easily from one country to the other; secondly, the practices of housing actors contribute to this growing division and take part in the discrete processes of social and urban fragmentation on a cross-border scale.