This article investigates how urban policies are meant to promote cohesion of a certain kind through neighbourhood-based urban regeneration programmes. The regeneration programme in focus aims at promoting socio-cultural encounters and ethnic minority participation, through particular notions of ‘mixing’. The authors argue that the particular notion of mixing at play in this context ‘blind spots’ questions of ethnic majority participation and culturalises broader structural issues, which often transgress local and national boundaries. Through two case studies, the authors illustrate how certain challenges in what is known as ‘ghettos areas’ become ethnicised and culturalised through a focus on the ethnicity and culture of ethnic minority residents as problematic.