Stéphanie Vermeersch

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.

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).

Rethinking Class and Space

In this concluding chapter, we will review what we have learned with regard to our research into urban space and what urban lifestyles, habits and the residential strategies of the middle classes have to tell us about contemporary cities, and the workings of segregation and social mix. As we indicated in Chapter 1, we took advantage of an empirical and yet multi-circumstantial approach in an effort to understand the relationship between the middle classes and their urban spaces. This has allowed us to analyse a range of socio-urban situations.

Residential Choice and Representation of Place

For middle-class households, residential choice is part of the way in which they seek to position themselves in social and urban space. The choice of residential location, tenure and housing type thus brings together the social and the spatial in various ways, reflecting desires for lifestyle, social and urban practices and identity. The choices of individual households translated into action can impact on socio-urban and population dynamics and the transformation of urban space.