Camilla Lewis

‘Regenerating community’? Urban change and narratives of the past

This paper explores how understandings of community and belonging have shifted in relation to rapid deindustrialization and subsequent waves of redevelopment in East Manchester. Drawing on ethnographic research, it focuses on two social settings which are under threat of closure – a coffee morning and a market place. In these settings, long-standing residents make community, paradoxically, by sharing narratives about the loss of social ties. Drawing on relational approaches to place, the discussion sheds light on the disruption between place and identity in post-industrial localities which have been reshaped by drastic physical regeneration. The paper argues that in order to understand the apparent contradiction between narratives of social decline and observations of abundant social relations, it is necessary to extend existing sociological and anthropological approaches to community and belonging.

Home and Community: Lessons from a Modernist Housing Scheme

This book explores the connections between architecture, home and community. It is based on the empirical examination of domestic experiences in a post-war modernist housing scheme: Claremont Court in Edinburgh, designed by Basil Spence. Offering a novel cross-disciplinary approach, it broadens our understanding of home and community by showing how residents create homes and articulate a sense of belonging, which is inescapably bounded by architecture. The first part of the book explains the relevance of Claremont Court through a cross-disciplinary reading from both an architectural and a socio-cultural perspective. The second part explores the domestic experiences of the current residents. The final part further develops the relationship between architecture, home and community, offering valuable insights for current debates on housing, home and community. A must-read for researchers from architecture, urban studies and the social sciences with an interest in housing. The book also provides ideas for conducting interdisciplinary research using a combination of text-based and visual methods.

Introduction: tackling the urban through ethnography

In 2006, a magnificent oak table with fine Indian ink drawings sat in an artist’s studio in Manchester in the north-west of England. Three metres in length, it displayed a relational network diagram of key decision makers in the city. The art piece, called The Thin Veneer of Democracy (UHC Collective 2007), sketched a web of connections drawing attention to the close relationships between individuals from public and private institutions in the city. The spidery diagram identified ‘the names of 101 institutions, officials, companies and private individuals invested in Manchester City Council’s Knowledge Capital project’ (UHC Collective 2007). The artists behind the table were critical of these relationships. They emphasised the political dynamics in the city as a cosy arrangement between connected individuals and drew attention to how others felt left out. This brought disquiet to the people named on the table. They discussed the artwork with each other, saying that collaboration to regenerate the city was to be celebrated rather than criticised. Fast forward to 2015. In this year the British government under a Conservative administration, and Manchester City Council under a Labour administration, announced a historic agreement to devolve spending power to the city region, including the city centre itself, affecting almost three million people. Devolved power allowed for independent decision making at cityregion level and this agreement was the culmination of decades-long lobbying from the Manchester City Council Executive (Haughton, et al. 2016). Yet the final decision for devolution happened in private in a meeting between the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne and the Leader of Manchester City Council, Sir Richard Leese. This was an ‘elite co-option’ (Smith and Richards 2016) and the outcome presented to the city region as a fait accompli. In the press release, Councillor Sir Richard Leese claimed the devolution plans were ‘revolutionary’ and a model that ‘other cities around the country would want to adopt and copy’ (Wintour 2014).

Researching the home using architectural and social science methods

This article explores the possibilities of using innovative, interdisciplinary methods for understanding home-making. Drawing on a study of Claremont Court (1959–1962), a post-war social housing scheme designed by Sir Basil Spence in Edinburgh, we discuss the methodological potentials of combining architectural and social science methods to study the home. Claremont Court was built in the post-war era as part of Scotland’s social housing drive. It was designed following the principles of ‘cross-class’ living in order to foster a sense of community. In subsequent years, inhabitants of the court have adapted their dwellings in numerous ways and the population of the court has changed dramatically. But, while meanings of home and understandings of the division between public and private have been reconfigured, the spatial layouts of the dwellings continue to shape residents’ sense of home. To explore how residents make home at Claremont Court, we use ‘facet methodology’, which opens up new ways of thinking about the research process through a ‘playful’ approach to epistemology. In doing so, we develop an innovative approach which combines architectural methods (including survey drawings and visual mappings of both dwellings and communal areas) with social science methods (including ‘traditional’ interviews and walk-along interviews). To conclude, we discuss the possibility of widening the scope of qualitative research by bringing architectural and social science methods into dialogue through visual methods, in order to attend to spatial and material aspects of the home. We argue that our novel cross-disciplinary approach broadens understandings of home, by bringing attention to the unspoken dimensions of physical space, embodied elements of home and what people said about their homes, all of which are central to home-making.

Making community through the exchange of material objects

Classic community studies have identified several ways in which material exchanges lie at the heart of kinship relationships and informal networks of support in working-class communities. This article re-examines some key emergent issues in light of social shifts that have occurred in East Manchester, a locality drastically reshaped by de-industrialization and numerous phases of urban regeneration. The ethnography explores how a group of older women made community in these neighbourhoods, which they perceive to be fragmenting through their extended families and friendship networks. The women continued to engage in strategies to support and care for each other and sustain social ties through the exchange of material objects. The analysis suggests that theories of gift exchange and material culture offer useful resources to reinvigorate community studies literature by identifying the ways in which gifts and objects remain central to sustaining kinship and friendship relationships.

Turning houses into homes: Living through urban regeneration in East Manchester

Repeated studies of urban regeneration have focused on the displacement of working class residents, but those who remain living in sites of urban change have received less attention. To attend to this gap, this paper focuses on the lives of long-standing residents in East Manchester, a site of urban regeneration, and examines their views of urban change. Ethnographic research reveals how the demolition and rebuilding of new houses has resulted in a deep sense of uncertainty. Drawing on anthropological theories of materiality, the analysis makes an original contribution to debates about urban regeneration, showing how social and material relations have been reconfigured and arguing that this in turn has created new meanings about the home.

Dislocation and Uncertainty in East Manchester: The Legacy of the Commonwealth Games

In 2002, the Commonwealth Games were championed as a win-win solution for Manchester. The sporting event would bring worldwide attention and investment to the city and offer a unique opportunity to kick start social regeneration, transforming the fortunes of some of Manchesters poorest neighbourhoods. This paper explores experiences of urban change, from the perspective of long-standing residents in the neighbourhoods of Beswick and Openshaw, which lie in East Manchester. Despite promises of legacy, these localities remain dislocated from the rest of the city and the future continues to be defined by uncertainty by the areas residents. In order to understand some of the tensions and difficulties that arise in projects of urban transformation we need to pay attention to the practical ways in which people make relationships to place (Massey 1995, 2001) which tend to be erased in dominant narratives about ‘legacy’. It argues that we must go beyond drawing simple conclusions of the ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ implications of regeneration processes in order to investigate the social effects of urban change for local populations.