Urban cracks, i.e. temporary in-between spaces within the city, are growing intervention sites of adult and community educational practices. Adult and community education operates within a social sphere mediating between individual aspirations and societal demands; never neutral interventions, but embedded within socio-political and societal discourses about community and citizenship. Historically, republican and communitarian notions of citizenship have inspired these practices within the city, contributing to the creation of respectively good / active citizens and strong / active communities. Within this approach, urban cracks are organised by adult and community educational practices to develop temporary communities of practice or identity aimed at learning to live together in an increasingly diverse and complex city, irrespective of social, historical and cultural contexts and meanings of these places or people involved. This dominant approach is challenged by a relational approach to citizenship whereby citizenship is not the outcome of educational efforts, but a starting point - the actual conditions that make up people’s lives (cf. Biesta 2011). We argue that urban cracks have potential as a social forum for civic education, building upon the experiences of two ongoing action research projects in two socially and ethnically diverse neighbourhoods in the city of Gent.