Emma Jackson

Place-making and place maintenance: performativity, place and belonging among the middle classes

This article introduces performativity and processes of place-making into discussions about middle-class residents’ place attachments. It draws on interviews with middle-class residents in two different London neighbourhoods, Peckham (inner urban, socially mixed) and West Horsley and Effingham (commuter belt villages), to argue that (1) the practice of place is key to understanding middle-class claims to belonging; and (2) ways of ‘doing’ neighbourhood must be understood within the context of other circulating representations. While respondents in Peckham work with or against prevailing discourses about their neighbourhood as they perform place, in the commuter belt, residents strive to uphold the image of their village as the rural idyll, a classed and racialised vision. The contrast between the inner city and commuter belt reveals the different performative registers through which place is practised; while in Peckham middle-class residents invest in processes of place-making, respondents in the commuter belt engage instead in active processes of place maintenance.

Neither ‘Deepest, Darkest Peckham’ nor ‘Run-of-the-Mill’ East Dulwich: The Middle Classes and their ‘Others’ in an Inner-London Neighbourhood

This article examines how middle-class residents of an inner-London neighbourhood draw up socio-spatial and symbolic boundaries between themselves and their ‘others’. Through a discussion of accounts of two very different boundaries — the boundary of a multi-ethnic high street and a less clearly defined boundary of a neighbouring middle-class area — we argue that the production of middle-class identities is bound up with processes of disaffiliation not only from proximate stigmatized areas, but also from more upmarket areas and the people who populate them. Against this background it becomes clear that middle-class claims to belonging are made through (1) the asymmetric processes by which the middle classes create and maintain spatial boundaries between themselves and racialized/classed others, and (2) the subtle processes of distinction that go on within the middle classes. Nevertheless, relationships to place remain ambivalent, and as neighbourhoods undergo change, physical boundaries separating one area from another refuse to stay put. We argue that the re-inscription of such boundaries in the accounts of middle-class respondents are attempts to create a stable identity on the shifting ground of the contemporary global city.

Revisiting ‘social tectonics’: The middle classes and social mix in gentrifying neighbourhoods:

Studies of gentrification in London have shown that some groups of middle-class people have been attracted to poor and multi-ethnic areas of inner London in part because of their social and ethnic mix. However, the attraction has often not translated into everyday interaction. In an earlier account of gentrification in Brixton this de facto social segregation was typified as a process of ‘social tectonics’. In this paper we compare two ethnically and socially mixed neighbourhoods, Peckham and Brixton, that at different times have represented the ‘front line’ of gentrification in London. We examine the extent to which the gentrification of Brixton in the late 1990s is being mirrored by the gentrification that is occurring today in Peckham – a similarly mixed and counter-cultural area of South London. Whilst we identify continuities between the gentrification process in these two areas separated by a decade of boom and recession, we suggest that the Peckham example demonstrates the need for a more developed approach to the issue of social mixing than that implied by the social tectonics metaphor. Specifically, we argue that there is a need to explain how the presence of classed and ethnic ‘others’ can be central to the formation of identities within some middle-class fractions in such enclaves in the inner city, and how attitudes and neighbourhood practices can change over time.

Being Middle Class

This chapter investigates whether — and to what extent — our respondents consider themselves to be middle class, how they explain what being middle class, or just “in the middle” means to them and the role of place in forging these classed identities. As discussed in Chapter 1, many political claims have been made on behalf of the middle classes. Here we ask whether such strategic uses of the term in contemporary political discourse bear any relation to our respondents’ sense of their own position.

Making the middle classes on shifting ground? Residential status, performativity and middle-class subjectivities in contemporary London†

This paper argues that shifts in access to housing - both in relation to rental and ownership - disrupt middle-class reproduction in ways that fundamentally influence class formation. While property ownership has had a long association with middle-class identities, status and distinction, an increasingly competitive rental market alongside inflated property prices has impacted on expectations and anxieties over housing futures. In this paper, we consider two key questions: (1) What happens to middle-class identities under the conditions of this wider structural change? (2) How do the middle classes variously manoeuvre within this? Drawing on empirical research conducted in London, we demonstrate that becoming an owner-occupier may be fractured along lines of class but also along the axes of age, wealth and timing, particularly as this relates to the housing market. It builds on understandings of residential status and place as central to the formation of class, orienting this around the recognition of both people and place as mutable, emphasizing that changing economic and social processes generate new class positionalities and strategies for class reproduction. We argue that these processes are writ large in practices of belonging and claims to place, with wider repercussions within the urban landscape.

Valuing the bowling alley: Contestations over the preservation of spaces of everyday urban multiculture in London

This article builds on ‘the convivial, everyday turn’ by approaching the workings of complex urban spaces of multiculture as entangled with processes of urban change that are infused with judgements and contestations about what is of value. The article explores the competing value claims made for a leisure space, a London bowling alley, used by a diverse group of people (in terms of dis/ability, ethnicity, gender, class and age) that has been threatened with demolition. It examines how arguments about diversity and inclusivity are deployed in these debates and how official discourses are resisted through the mobilisation of other articulations of social value. The article argues that the combination of the hollowing out of the concept of diversity and the political and economic context results in a paradox whereby multiculturalism is celebrated as an atmosphere and generator of capital while existing physical spaces of everyday urban multiculture are at best unprotected and at worst not recognised, devalued and demolished.

From class to gentrification and back again

In this chapter, we argue for the need to carefully scrutinise the models of class that underlie understandings of gentrification and how they are mobilised, while also introducing more recent considerations from the sociology of class that focus on values and classificatory struggles (Skeggs 1997, 2004; Tyler 2015) into the study of gentrification. Our contention is that when rethinking gentrification to account both for the specificity of different contexts around the world and to speak to a planetary gentrification that can account for very different social, economic and political histories, different registers and languages of gentrification (Lees et al. 2016), it is timely to revisit and revitalise the understandings of class that have underpinned this body of research. In many ways, what we present here is a logical extension of concerns that, as Lees at al. (2016) remind us, have long been at the heart of urban theory that warn against the ethnocentric imposition of theories developed in Western European industrialized economies onto the reality of urbanization in other economic and social systems. Simply put, we question the extent to which conceptualisations of class variously developed to explain 19th century labour relations and the class struggles emerging from industrialization (in Western European economies), and the manifestation of such relations of power through taste and consumption practices (cf. Bourdieu 1984), are fit to the purpose of critically analysing contemporary processes of gentrification the world over.

The Middle Classes and the City

The impact of the middle classes on the city has been a focus of considerable academic and political attention, most recently concerning the spread of gentrification through cities across the world. Yet the middle classes are increasingly occupying a diverse range of neighbourhoods across the urban system. Through a comparison of such neighbourhoods in Paris and London, this book seeks to explore the dynamics of these forms of territorialisation and the consequences for understanding the sociology, politics and geography of the contemporary city.

Locating the Middle Classes in London and Paris

The discussion in this chapter is informed by the two key research questions presented in the introduction about how the middle classes give identity to the areas in which they live and secondly, how they in turn derive their identities from living there. In other words, we present the different social and spatial morphologies of our research areas and how they help us understand how the middle classes relate to the city and the city region and to other social groups within these areas. The chapter is divided into four main sections, the first two of which are concerned with “locating the middle classes” theoretically (especially in the French and English research traditions), firstly, sociologically and, secondly, geographically. We then move on in the third section to identify their present and recent social geography in the specific contexts of Paris and London. This discussion is situated in the context of the changing dynamics of Paris and London as global cities. In the fourth section, we specify the ten neighbourhoods that form the basis of our study in which we discuss the rationale and basis of the comparison we draw between these neighbourhoods.

Staying Middle Class

The analysis of strategies of class reproduction has become a key way of understanding the middle classes and different fractions of work, identity and lifestyle within them. It is the core of Bourdieu’s neo-Marxist sociology but is also crucial to more liberal, Weberian approaches concerned with social mobility (or the lack of it) (Goldthorpe, 1996). Ideas and categories drawn more directly from Marx have influenced strongly conceptions of class in urban studies from Castells’s The Urban Question (1979) onwards. These approaches have tended to see a strong mapping of class distinctions onto divisions of urban space, notably in links to the housing market. Marxist approaches suggest how, for instance, the middle class (conceived as a part of the bourgeoisie) dominates urban space. This domination is evident in the abundant research on gentrification that testifies to class division through expansion in urban space (into lower income neighbourhoods) and the resulting divisions and displacement of poorer residents. Bourdieu-inspired research also suggests this dominance of the middle classes in urban space, where their choices and affiliation determine the character and social composition of neighbourhood in forms of “elective belonging” (Savage et al., 2005).