Many neighborhoods in the Netherlands have reached the stage of colliding subcultures and interpersonal conflict. In some places, this social-cultural diversity leads to fear, uncertainty and irritation. Multi-ethnic community boards are starting to function as mediatory panels for settling disputes between neighbors and neighborhood residents. This article claims that community mediation--a form of alternative dispute resolution designed to resolve interpersonal conflict in the neighborhood--is both an attempt to rejuvenate the idea of community and a new way to settle differences and interpersonal conflicts between neighbors in the Netherlands. It suggests that the neighborhood may be a level too high for social intervention, and that instead the focus should be on the house, the block or, at most, the street. A need orientation to solving conflicts can be an important starting point in a process of institutional analysis. From a need-oriented model, it is important that community mediation can develop in an inductive way, bottom-up, pre-institutional, by people defining their own problems and by mediators accepting and starting from the definition of the situation made by the complainant and the respondent. Notes, tables, references