‘We want to be there for everyone’: imagined spaces of encounter and the politics of place in a super-diverse neighbourhood

In the context of increasingly diverse urban populations in European cities, neighbourhood organizations are often seen as offering spaces of encounter that can foster a sense of belonging. As a result, they have formed an important element in urban policies on community identity and social cohesion. Yet everyday encounters in such micro-publics may not necessarily be experienced as positive, and these spaces themselves might become sites of contestation and exclusion. Through an ethnographic study in a super-diverse neighbourhood in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, this paper investigates how residents’ sense of belonging to the neighbourhood is informed by competing claims on a neighbourhood centre. Although envisioned as a collective space, contestations between different groups of residents over the centre as a functional and meaningful place illustrate how governing institutions shape informal politics of place through their own vision for the neighbourhood and their selective support of some initiatives over others.     

HOW CHILDREN PLACE THEMSELVES AND OTHERS IN LOCAL SPACE

This study examines the ways in which children aged 11 to 15 in six adjacent neighbourhoods in a medium-sized Swedish town place themselves and others in local space. Special attention is given to how they discuss a neighbourhood stigmatized in the public discourse and how children who live in this neighbourhood react to the negative representations of the place in which they live. The study is based on group interviews and maps. The study shows that children construct representations of their own neighbourhoods as "quiet" neighbourhoods and place objects of "trouble" and "danger" somewhere else. It is argued that this is done both in relation to their personal knowledge of the neighbourhood and in relation to local and/or media representations of their own and other neighbourhoods. It is shown that the children are influenced by media representations of a stigmatized neighbourhood, but also that they are not passive reproducers of these discourses and that some of them are able to offer counter-discourses. The children living in this neighbourhood experience difficulties in defending it as the quiet place which they perceive it to be to outsiders because of the negative discourses.     

The in-between lives of Japanese immigrants in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria,Spain

Over the past 20 years, the theoretical frameworks of population mobility studies have undergone profound changes. The redefinition of the term diaspora, the rise of transnational analysis, the formulation of the embodied experiences of migration, the increasing interest in migrants' attachment to places, gendered expectations and transcultural processes have coalesced to enrich knowledge. This article explores the culturally mediated experiences of migration and the individual change processes among the members of the Japanese community that from the 1960s onwards settled in the city of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain), a meeting point for East and West in the Mid-Atlantic. In spite of its small size, this community displays some characteristics that afford new conceptual insights into cultural in-betweenness. Our aim is to contribute to the burgeoning literature on migrants' sense and ways of being and belonging and on their experience of return, within the analytical framework of diaspora and transnationalism. This article makes use of an interpretative approach, and contrasts relevant local news items and biographical interviews with Japanese residents with the narrative texts of three returnees. This contrapuntal focus reveals their ambivalent sense of belonging ‘here and there’, their in-betweenness or their lives in aidagara.     

Nostalgia as Affective Landscape: Negotiating Displacement in the “World City”

Bangalore, an aspiring “world city”, is rapidly transforming as factories and mills are sold to private developers. As their neighbourhoods now accommodate multi-million-dollar gated communities and post-industrial labour markets, residents experience an in situ displacement, staying in place while landscapes around them dramatically reconfigure. This paper makes sense of how old-time residents locate themselves within such urban growth through nostalgic invocations of the past. Emplaced within histories and geographies of neighbourhood change, nostalgia creates “affective landscapes” through which residents invoke their closeness to past landscapes of abundance and involvement in community-making. Such affective landscapes bring together embodied, sensorial, and more-than-human fields of action to shape an everyday politics in which residents narrate their marginalization within the world city and articulate their own value here.     

Coloured Cabinets: A Reflection on Material Culture as a Marker of Coloured Identity in Cloetesville,South Africa

In coloured neighbourhoods of the Western Cape in South Africa, there are objects in people's homes that live in a unique historical and cultural moment. This article reports on an examination, in the neighbourhood of Cloetesville, Stellenbosch, of how these objects inside residents’ homes tell a story of a creolised people and the locations in which they are situated. In the case of Cloetesville, as in many neighbourhoods that arose from a history of forced removals, many people experience various social and economic problems. Coloured people's identities are commonly thought to rest in these problems. This article, however, seeks to suggest an alternative way of exploring coloured identity through looking at objects in households and broader living environments. Thus, I hope to provide insight into different yet distinct experiences by contributing new perspectives through looking at nostalgic and ordentlike (respectable) sentiments of belonging. Specifically cabinets in living rooms are conceptualised as repositories of such sentiments in the home, and how the objects residing in the home have the power/ability to symbolically ground their owners in the neighbourhood of Cloetesville.     

Photography,public pedagogy and the politics of place-making in post-industrial areas

This paper discusses the way in which public photographic depictions of places and place-based communities contribute to the construction of local identity and community building. Being public and visualised statements about what a place and the people living there are and what they are not, photographs incite public debate about place and community. The paper discusses two interventions, one in Ghent, Belgium, involving professional photographers from outside the neighbourhood, and one in Bonnybridge, Scotland, involving amateur photography by local residents. Both are attempts by community workers to encourage citizens to discuss alternative realities of themselves, their neighbours and their neighbourhood. Starting from theories of place-making and public pedagogy, we reveal how both nonetheless exemplify very different strategies to democratise community-building processes.     

地方感的多态与分异：不同人群对旧城街区的感知

地方感指人与地方的情感关联,是地理学特别是人文主义地理学的关键概念。快速城镇化使得“地方”剧变,地方感也变得复杂多样,多元主体的地方感形成机制值得探讨。本文基于人文主义地理学视角,选取江苏省如皋市东大街为典型案例,通过实地调研,运用半结构化访谈等方法,将不同主体的地方感归纳为三类：根植型、创造型和关怀型。老年原住民形成了根植型地方感,其重点在血缘联结、归属感、身份认同;沿街商户生成了创造型地方感,主要涉及美学、经验与私人空间等;虽从地方抽离但仍与地方保持着积极情感纽带的“乡邻”们则形成了关怀型地方感,主要涉及关注、社会互动、熟悉等。借助案例剖析和质性研究方法,本文对地方感多元类型和形成机制的深入探讨将有助于理解地方感的多态性和分异性。     

Living with difference in hyper-diverse areas: how important are encounters in semi-public spaces?

Urban populations increasingly diversify in their socio-economic, cultural, religious and linguistic profiles as well as in their lifestyles, attitudes and activity patterns. This hyper-diversification can complicate feelings of belonging and community. Since diversity is negotiated at the neighbourhood level, micro spaces are central in building communities. Micro spaces tend to be semi-public and stimulate diverse groups to intermingle, which results in on–off as well as repetitive and structural interactions. Understanding the creation and impact of encounters is central to capturing contemporary notions of belonging and living with difference. This paper compares encounters experienced in two semi-public spaces in the hyper-diverse neighbourhood of Feyenoord in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Although encounters at the library were lighter and shorter than at the community-centre, all positively impact collective life in the neighbourhood. At the community-centre, encounters result in light as well as deeper relationships, making visitors feel more at ‘home’ because they recognize others elsewhere in the neighbourhood. At the library, encounters are lighter but visitors become familiar with diversity, making them feel more at ‘home’ and safe in their neighbourhood as well. The study suggests that fleeting encounters require more serious attention within the context of negotiating diversity.     

Dis-placed voices: sense of place and place-identity on the Sunshine Coast

The geographical literature on place interrogates, amongst other notions, sense of place, place identity, and their connections or disruptions. Although notions of place are multiple and very fluid, place transformation in rural and regional areas may be more rapid than the changing understandings of place held by residents. This research examines notions of place held by residents on the Sunshine Coast of Australia, one of the fastest growing ‘sea change’ regions in the nation. It presents a reading of empirical material that suggests sense of place and place-identity cannot be easily equated in the region. Sense of place was more important to rural and long-term residents than was the place-identity. Landscape change in the region is narrated, and images of place-identity interpreted, to suggest that place-identity has been created and imposed by the globalising forces of development, rather than emanating from many resident's perspectives. Those local voices have been, and continue to be, successively displaced and disrupted. Thus discursive power in various ways shapes and is shaped by dominant place-identity in the region, and some voices are blocked by the discourses of urbanisation. The unequal geographies of power shaping the regional landscape need to be acknowledged within place transformation processes. These geographies of power suggest that sense of place can be thought of as a ‘view from the bottom’, while place-identity primarily functions as a ‘view from the top’.     

Hierarchies of trade in Yiwu and Dushanbe: The case of an Uzbek merchant family from Tajikistan

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the trading trajectory of an Uzbek family of merchants from Tajikistan. This family runs businesses in both Tajikistan’s capital, Dushanbe, and China’s famous international trading city: Yiwu. The analysis is centred on the accounts placed by Tajikistan’s Uzbek merchants about their historically sustained experience, often across several generations, in trading activities. These merchants’ claims of belonging to a ‘historical’ trading community rather than being ‘newcomers’ to long-distance commerce are articulated in relation to notions of ‘hierarchies of trade’ as they evolve in a twofold relational model linking Yiwu’s Changchun neighbourhood and Dushanbe. I suggest that the forms of conviviality enacted in Yiwu’s Changchun neighbourhood need to be understood in terms of the historical, multinational and transregional contacts that have occurred within the spaces of the former Soviet Union, as well as along the China-Russia and China-Central Asian borders. Equally, the hierarchies of trade of Uzbek merchants from Tajikistan in Yiwu’s Changchun neighbourhood cut-across markers of identity that juxtapose the roles of Tajik and Uzbek communities in Tajikistan’s contemporary politics and economics.     

Perceptions of trekking tourism and social and environmental change in Nepal's Himalayas

The Himalayas are among the world's youngest mountain ranges. In addition to the geologic processes of mountain building and erosion, they are also highly vulnerable to human influenced change, occurring at local, national, regional, and international scales. A photo-elicitation methodology is employed to show how residents perceive those changes from historical perspectives, as well as their current conditions and impacts on their daily lives. Nepal's Khumbu region has undergone major social and environmental transformations since the 1960s when international trekking first began to influence the area's economy. The current perceptions of Khumbu residents of these changes are assessed through photo-elicitation interviews. Their responses are placed in the historical context of: (1) institutional and political changes, most of which have been driven by national government policies; (2) social and economic changes, for which the tourism economy has been central; and (3) environmental changes, reflecting the impacts of resource management and climate change. The mostly positive perceptions of Khumbu residents toward how their region has changed reflects general improvements in the physical and cultural landscapes of the Khumbu over time, as well as its continuing geographic isolation, which has helped to slow the rate of globalization, while also keeping the region a dynamic and popular tourist destination.     

Reconceptualising comfort as part of local belonging: the use of confidence,commitment and irony

Abstract

This paper offers a theoretical framework for the analysis of belonging in local communities. To do so it draws on a broad existing literature which argues that comfort is a key dimension of our attachments to place. The argument that experiences of local belonging (or otherwise) are related to a person’s sense of comfort is a persuasive one, though current conceptualisations do not always adequately reflect this contention. As a consequence, our ability as geographers to adequately theorise our relationship to local places remains limited. This paper presents an empirical examination of comfort and local belonging amongst residents of a social housing estate in the North-east of England, and explores comfort as it is expressed through acts of confidence, commitment and irony. It concludes by arguing that taking comfort more seriously might lead us to a more agentic and reflexive understanding of local belonging and attachment.     

Cultural production in peripheral urban spaces: lessons from Barriera,Turin (Italy)

Practices of cultural production within a peripheral urban neighbourhood can contribute to foster the sense of place, community belonging and local collective action. Starting from a critical perspective on the interconnections between cultural practices and urban regeneration, and developing on the concept of place-making, the paper has two main purposes: to investigate the nature of embeddedness of these practices and explore the ways of self-organization of cultural actors and their relationships with public policies. The case study concerns ‘Barriera di Milano’, a large peripheral area in Turin (Italy), formerly one of the most industrialized zones of the city. Over the past few years, and particularly after the real-estate bubble burst of 2007–2008, in Barriera a lively concentration of initiatives of culture has been taking place, redefining the urban and social space. These initiatives seem to be innovative for many reasons: firstly, while demonstrating a peculiar but significant embeddedness in the neighbourhood, they are mostly self-generated; secondly, the institutional assets, the economic self-sufficiency and the low degree of connection among initiatives support new forms of citizenship and place-making based on a ‘not-for-profit entrepreneurship’.     

Contested mobilities: gendered migration pressures among Cambodian youth

This paper explores how gender norms and expectations shape the migration decision-making processes of Cambodian young people, in a community characterized by high levels of migration to Thailand. Based on qualitative fieldwork with migrant and nonmigrant youth, I examine how young people make sense of migration and its local alternatives, and highlight the various gendered pressures that young people, and particularly men, experience for migration. Given the lack of local life-making alternatives that neatly conform to hegemonic masculine ideals, young men experience strong pressures for migration and encounter negative social judgments where they seek to stay put. In contrast, young women experience less forceful migration pressures, perceive meaningful alternative life-making projects in the village, and feel more free to actively resist migration. More generally, my findings highlight the importance of interrogating gendered processes of migration not only in terms of how they affect women and those who choose to migrate but also with consideration to how they affect men, and those who choose – or would prefer – to stay home.     

The Effects of a Campaign on Awareness and Participation Among Local Youth at the Lenggong Valley World Heritage Site,Malaysia

The capacity of a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site (WHS) to sustain its designated criteria into the future is a function of how valuable local residents perceive the WHS to be, and how motivated they are to contribute toward efforts to maintain its status. In June 2012, Malaysia’s Lenggong Valley became a WHS. We investigate the effectiveness of a campaign targeting young local residents to increase their awareness of the importance of preserving the heritage of Lenggong. We undertook a questionnaire — designed to assess participants’ awareness of the value of the WHS and their willingness to participate in efforts to maintain the WHS — aimed at students from all three secondary schools in Lenggong before and after the campaign. In all, 175 completed questionnaires were analysed: the data revealed that the campaign had a significant effect on improving participants’ awareness of the value of the WHS and on improving their willingness to participate in WHS conservation activities.     

Homecoming or tourism? Diaspora tourism experience of second-generation immigrants

Diaspora tourism is often considered a form of ‘homecoming,’ but for the children of immigrants who are born in the new country, the question remains as to whether they perceive their parents’ homeland as ‘home’ or destination. Moreover, advancements in transportation and communication technologies allow contemporary immigrants to maintain transnational ties to their homeland, which in turn may affect the nature of diaspora tourism. The purpose of this study is to understand the lived experience of second-generation immigrants when they travel to their ancestral homeland, and explore the extent to which second-generation transnationalism shapes their diaspora tourism experiences. Using a phenomenological approach, 26 second-generation Chinese-Americans who had the experience of traveling in China were interviewed. Four themes were identified from semi-structured interviews: language and appearance, search for authenticity, family history, and sense of ‘home.’ Proficiency in their parental language was found to be a main cause of negative experiences, yet occasionally a source of pride and attachment. Their search for authentic experiences was not unlike other tourists, while familial obligations sometimes limited their experience. Traveling back to the homeland not only allowed them to understand their parents and family history, but also reflect upon their life through experiencing contemporary China. Finally, as the transnational attachment of second-generation immigrants was not rooted in a specific locale, they could feel connected to the homeland without actually visiting their family's place of origin. Findings contribute to transnationalism and diaspora tourism literature by comparing first- and second-generation immigrants and identifying the difference between contemporary transmigrants and classic diaspora groups with regard to their diaspora tourism experience.     

‘Wherever I lay my head is home’ – young people's experience of home in the Brazilian street environment

Although academic research on street children is increasing, few have discussed the multiple meanings of home, as well as young people's perspectives on their homeless status. Drawing on several qualitative fieldwork studies in Salvador, Brazil, this article explores the ‘home’ narratives of a group seldom appraised: the grown-up ‘street children’ of the 1980s and 1990s. Although many of these young people may be described as homeless in a territorial sense, their narratives demonstrate the complex ways in which many feel or have felt at home in the streets of a middle-class neighbourhood. The feeling of being at home is closely interlinked to aspects they find important in their everyday lives, namely that of autonomy, safety and belonging. This analysis illustrates earlier ignored dimensions of why young people choose the street rather than home, and in addition, challenges some common definitions and assumptions.     

On the Stickiness of Territorial Stigma: Diverging Experiences in Amsterdam’s Most Notorious Neighbourhood

In Western Europe, a select number of “ghettos” are at the forefront of public anxieties about urban inequality and failed integration. These notorious neighbourhoods at the bottom of the moral spatial order are imagined as different and disconnected from the rest of the city. This paper examines how residents in Amsterdam Bijlmer, a peripheral social housing estate long portrayed as the Dutch ghetto, experience the symbolic denigration of their neighbourhood. Interviews show that all residents are highly aware of the negative racial, cultural and material stereotypes associated with their neighbourhood. However, these negative stereotypes are not equally felt: territorial stigma “sticks” more to some residents than others and substantial inequalities are observed in who carries the burden of renegotiating blemish of place. Differential engagement with stigma depends on how residents’ identity and the materiality of their surroundings intersect with stigmatising narratives of place.     

Villagizing the city: turning rural ethnic heritage into urban modernity in southwest China

This paper examines the rural ethnic heritage-inspired transformation of the built environment of a relatively small county town in China. The paper explores the ways village-based ethnic heritage is being repositioned by local leaders as a resource for tourism-oriented revenue generation and for ‘improving’ the ‘quality’ and behaviour of town residents. Viewing heritage as a ‘technology of government,’ the paper provides an analysis based on three interrelated themes: the discourses by which town leaders and planners have conceived the heritage development project as one of improvement, the spatial practices by which those discourses have been realised in the built environment, and the ways residents themselves have appropriated and ‘inhabited’ this new ‘villagized’ city as they go about their everyday urban lives. Based on ethnographic field work, a survey, and extended interviews over a period of four years, the paper finds the town leadership’s faith in the ability of the built environment to shape and improve the conduct of citizens to be overstated. While the town’s transformation has generated a new sense of urban modernity among residents, their ways of inhabiting and using urban space have little relevance to the ‘heritagized’ environment in which they now live.     

Citizenship and Belonging in the Rural Fringe: A Case Study of a Hindu Temple in Sydney,Australia

Despite Australian multicultural policy that asserts the right of all citizens to maintain and practice their religion, formal citizenship has not guaranteed the welcome or belonging of migrant religious groups at the neighbourhood scale. This is most starkly reflected in contests over the inclusion of minority religious spaces in the Australian landscape, which increasingly take place in the rural–urban fringe of metropolitan areas. This work examines the controversy over a proposed Hindu temple in metropolitan Sydney and reveals insights into the way that rural–urban fringe space is imagined, understood and experienced by land use planners, residents and temple members. Critical discourse analysis of policy documentation along with interviews reveals that land use planners circumscribe belonging in the landscape through the use of zoning ordinances and design controls, local residents mark the boundaries of white privilege through narratives of heritage and cultural difference and temple members claim rights to citizenship based on assertions of sameness.