Mobilities and Neighbourhood Belonging in Cities and Suburbs

P. Watt, P. Smets, P. Watt, P. Smets

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349434336, 9781137003621
• eBook ISBN: 9781137003638
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Contemporary city and suburban dwellers are constantly on the move. Does this mean they lack a sense of belonging to their neighbourhoods, or does enhanced mobility co-exist with feelings of community and belonging? This collection examines these questions through a unique series of neighbourhood-based global case studies.

1

Introduction

Paul Watt and Peer Smets

1.1 Going mobile – the new mobilities paradigm

Back in 1971, The Who’s main songwriter, Pete Townsend, perfectly captured globalization’s restless, placeless, nomadic spirit in ‘Going Mobile’, a song that appeared on the Who’s Next album:

When I’m driving free, the world’s my home when I’m mobile.

(Songmeanings, 2013; lyrics © SPIRIT ONE
MUSIC OBO TOWSER TUNES)

‘Going Mobile’ celebrates the joys of the open road, one that stretches way beyond the confines of Highway 51 or Route 66 to embrace a borderless world in which the late-twentieth century, jet-setting rock star can be an ‘air conditioned gypsy’ (Songmeanings, 2013) living in his (nearly always ‘his’) mobile bubble which keeps him out of reach of the police and the taxman. As with many other socio-cultural practices pioneered by 1960s/1970s, rock stars – recreational drug use, casual sex and finding God (Buddha, Allah, etc.) – ‘going mobile’ has become a routine part of life for millions of people across the Global North as they criss-cross the globe for business or tourism.

In fact for some social theorists, being ‘on the move’ is the defining experience of the twenty-first century human condition (Bauman, 1998; Urry, 2000). The scale and pace of contemporary travel for work or leisure – both within and across national borders – is immense. According to John Urry (2009), the number of legal international arrivals per year stood at a mere 25 million in 1950, a figure that is predicted to rise to one billion by 2010. Globally, more people are on the move, either forcibly or voluntarily, and they are ‘traveling further and faster’ (Urry, 009: 477–78) than ever before. Such intensifying mobility, combined with proliferating forms of mobility (both real and virtual), is according to some social scientists destabilizing neat socio-spatial containers such as ‘city’, ‘neighbourhood’ and even ‘society’ (Urry, 2000, 2007; Boutros and Straw, 2010). In order to theorize such mobility, Urry and colleagues have developed a ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (NMP) – or ‘mobilities turn’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006a; Elliott and Urry, 2010; Urry, 2000, 2007, 2009). This NMP represents nothing less than an attempt to provide a cross-disciplinary reshaping of how the social sciences go about theorizing, understanding and explaining the post-modern world; ‘it is transformative of social science, authorizing an alternative theoretical and methodological landscape’ (Buscher and Urry, 2009: 99–100).

Corporeal travel tends to be valorized since it is associated with affluent populations; for example, the UK’s richest quintile travel 3.5 times as far as the poorest quintile (cited in Cass et al., 2005). Leading proponents of the NMP deny that they are normatively privileging a male, bourgeois subject as some critics have suggested (Skeggs, 2004). There is also recognition from the NMP that not all mobility is volitional or empowering, and hence migration, transnationalism and diaspora are included within its purview alongside tourism (Hannam et al., 2006). At the same time, as Larry Ray (2002) argues, there is also a tendency in some mobilities literature to downplay issues of forced migration and refugees. Indeed an empirical focus on ‘globals’ who lead privileged ‘mobile lives’ in combination with proliferating neologisms (‘affect storage’, ‘network capital’, ‘portable personhood’, ‘ambient place’) means that the NMP does come close to presenting, if not celebrating, heightened mobility as a constitutive aspect of ‘the good life’: ‘the desirable life is not only about money and possessions; it is about movement, the capacity to escape, to be elsewhere’ (Elliott and Urry, 2010: 80).

It is therefore worth emphasizing how corporeal travel is profoundly stratified: ‘there are very different social and economic processes that generate a global culture of consumer tourism on the one hand and some 10 million migrants and 25 million displaced persons on the other’ (Ray, 2007: 192). In Bauman’s (1998: 92–93) view, the ubiquity of the contemporary nomadic experience glosses over the categorical distinction between ‘tourists’ (sun-seekers in search of consumer delights alongside global businesspeople and conference-attending professionals) who choose to travel and ‘vagabonds’ (economic migrants, asylum seekers, refugees) who are compelled to travel: ‘tourists move because they find the world within their (global) reach irresistibly attractive – the vagabonds move because they find the world within their (local) reach unbearably inhospitable’. The latter are subject to national border controls and state surveillance mechanisms that tourists glide through.

In its relatively short academic life, the NMP has had a considerable impact on the social sciences. A dedicated Mobilities journal has been running since 2006 with contributors from a wide range of disciplines. At the same time, the novelty of the NMP and its self-avowed radical lexicon has been challenged from various directions (Ray, 2002; Binnie et al., 2007; Cresswell, 2011). As editors we share some of these reservations regarding the grander claims made for the transformative potential of the NMP, but we nevertheless think that a mobilities lens can help to illuminate how urban and suburban neighbourhoods are constituted as dynamic rather than static places: ‘although it is tempting to conceive of neighbourhood as a commodity with fixed, clearly defined characteristics, it is more appropriately viewed in a more dynamic perspective’ (Galster, 2001: 2116). Such dynamism is related to how meaning and belonging vis-à-vis neighbourhoods are constructed, and also how neighbourhoods are generated from and are generative of socio-spatial hierarchies of inequality and power. As this book demonstrates, mobilities of various types are highly intertwined with belonging at the neighbourhood level.

1.2 Mobilities and the city

In Mobilities Urry (2007) promotes a movement-driven social science that pays attention to physical movements, potential movements and blocked movements as being part of social, economic and political relations. He distinguishes five interdependent mobilities: the corporeal travel of people (our main focus in this book), the physical movement of objects, imaginative travel, virtual travel and communicative travel (letters, texts, etc.). Although not all kinds of movements are accompanied by meeting other people, meeting up is needed for establishing and maintaining trust relations that enable continuation of these relations during periods of distance and solitude. Such relationships are characterized by a diversity of connections that are more or less at a distance, more or less fast and more or less intense. Moreover, reasons for meeting up differ: formal obligations (e.g. legal, economic and familial commitments); and less formal obligations, accompanied by strong normative expectations of being present and attentive, face-to-face or body-to-body contact (hand shaking or sexual intimacy). Due to how ‘people’s daily time-space patterns [are] being desynchronized from work, community and home and hence from each other’ (Urry, 2007: 274), a wide range of mobility patterns and flows can be distinguished.

Such flows of people, goods, money and images are by no means new phenomena, and certainly not so in relation to the urban. Towns and travel routes are intimately connected, as Deleuze and Guattari (2013: 503) opine:

The town is the correlate of the road. The town only exists as a function of circulation, and of circuits; it is a remarkable point on the circuits that create it, and which it creates. It is defined by entries and exits; something must enter it and exit from it.

Mobility has indeed long been a prominent theme within urban sociology, dating back to Georg Simmel’s 1903 essay The Metropolis and Mental Life, in which the modern city is understood through its movements and restlessness, such that ‘the diversity of stimuli and the visual appropriations of place are centrally important features of that new modern urban experience’ (Urry, 2007: 22). Indeed Urry (2007) credits Simmel with being the first to develop a mobilities paradigm (see also Jensen, 2006). It is notable that four out of the six social theorists whom Urry (2009: 479) cites as being ‘important guides’ for understanding contemporary mobilities – Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau as well as Simmel – are urbanists (Tonkiss, 2005). Urry (2009: 484) also draws studies attention to the Chicago School as providing a ‘range of post-Simmelian mobility [ . . . ] concerned with the itinerant lives of hoboes, gangs, prostitutes, migrants, and so on’. As Jørgensen (2010) has emphasized, the emphasis on urban mobilities was a prominent feature of the Chicago School’s approach, notably in Robert Park’s account of how the ‘zone in transition’ is formed from the combined flows of rooming-house inhabitants and visitors to the zone’s often nefarious entertainment places. If anything, Urry (2009) wishes to steer urban sociology back onto the mobilities’ path from which he considers it was diverted by a post-Chicago School structural paradigmatic dominance.

The NMP offers a potentially powerful theoretical lens for thinking through how cities, including neighbourhoods, are constituted by flows as well as structures. Amin and Thrift (2002: 43) describe modern cities as ‘extraordinary agglomerations of flows’ and they place the increasing importance of accelerating mobilities centre stage in their programmatic attempt to ‘reimagine the urban’. More specifically, the NMP has generated a wide range of insightful analyses of urban cultural and material practices. These include the interrelationships between the city and mobile technologies such as Wi-Fi and mobile phones (Sheller and Urry, 2006b), being on the move in cities (Jensen, 2009), the mobilities and mobilizations of the urban poor (Ureta, 2008; Jaffe et al., 2012), the circulation of urban culture (Boutros and Straw, 2010), commuting and rail transportation systems (Butcher, 2011), city branding (Paganoni, 2012) and how a specific city – Singapore – can be described as a ‘Mobile City’ (Oswin and Yeoh, 2010).

While the NMP has influenced urban studies, it is noteworthy that two major urban journals, International Journal of Urban and Regional Studies and Urban Studies, have only recently had dedicated issues on mobilities (Jaffe et al., 2012; Skelton and Gough, 2013, respectively). Furthermore, a specialist urban journal, Spaces and Flows: An International Journal of Urban and ExtraUrban Studies (which focuses ‘on spaces and flows as crucibles and vectors of ongoing transformation’, Spaces and Flows, 2013) has only been in existence since 2010. All of this perhaps suggests that urban studies has been somewhat laggard in recognizing how the NMP can help to illuminate urban and suburban lives, places and processes.

1.3 The aims of the book

With the above in mind, one of the key aims of this edited collection is to examine and potentially enhance the links between urban studies and mobility studies. In relation to the former, the chapters focus on urban and suburban neighbourhoods, but with an emphasis on revealing how residents – be they locals, old-timers, newcomers or ex-residents – experience living in such places and what senses, if any, they have of belonging there; that is, of community, rootedness and being at home. Neighbourhoods are spatially fixed and determinate places, but they are also simultaneously being constantly made and remade via flows of people as they circulate in and out of, within and around these residential locales. Neighbourhood residents themselves are not fixed in place, but traverse the city and even the globe. In terms of such corporeal flows of people, three forms of ‘personal mobilities’ (Kellerman, 2006) are discussed in this book. These are: firstly, everyday mobilities for work and leisure; secondly, longer-term travelling, for example moving abroad for periods of time; and thirdly, residential mobility when households make a more permanent move from one home to another. Although the volume highlights the mobilities of neighbourhood residents, there is also concern in several chapters with visitors who come to a neighbourhood for work or leisure. There are therefore parallels with the Chicago School emphasis on neighbourhood mobilities (Jorgensen, 2010), but the mobilities lens we have adopted here means that all urban and suburban neighbourhoods can be regarded as, in a sense, ‘zones in transition’. Aside from spatial mobility, neighbourhoods are also marked by social mobility, often subjective in nature, as residents consider themselves and their areas to be moving ‘up’ or ‘down’ the social ladder, and this also features in several chapters.

The collection is interdisciplinary, albeit with strong leanings towards urban sociology. The first four chapters (Andreotti et al., Giglia, Gato, Smets and Hellinga) take their primary inspiration from a sociological approach that aims to link together social and spatial practices of distinction-making along Bourdieuvian lines, notably via a critical engagement with Mike Savage’s notion of ‘elective belonging’ (Savage, 2010). By way of contrast, Le Grand and Kajdanek employ the more traditional framework of community to investigate neighbourhood belonging. Others chapters draw variously upon concepts derived from social anthropology (‘locality production’ – Bohlin; ‘ethnoscape’ – Watt et al.), urban planning (‘Zwischenstadt’ – Keil and Young) and ethnic studies (‘diaspora’ – Watt et al.).

The chapters on Mexico City, Lisbon and Rotterdam focus on how the physical form and spatial layout of urban neighbourhoods intersect with various forms of mobility and social divisions to exacerbate or ameliorate notions of belonging. These chapters offer a rich sociological commentary on how contemporary cities are becoming increasingly ‘capsular’ (de Cauter, 2002) via the formation of sealed, self-referential gated communities, theme parks and shopping malls. These chapters raise political questions regarding how urban space is being remade in ways that stratify and create zones of exclusion. Bohlin, Le Grand, Oppenchaim, and Keil and Young further examine such political questions in their chapters by highlighting issues of urban, suburban (or post-suburban) governance and transportation. Furthermore, several chapters have a deliberate suburban/edge-of-city focus. This focus helps to foreground cities’ peripheral spaces as sites of mobility and thereby unsettles the stereotypical view of the suburbs as the orderly, stable, socially homogeneous ‘other’ to the dynamic and diverse inner city (Millington, 2011).

Taken as a whole, the chapters provide a set of theoretically informed studies on neighbourhood belonging and mobilities across an international range of cities. Both northern and southern European cities are well represented, including London, Paris, Lyon and Rotterdam in the case of the former, and Lisbon, Madrid and Milan in the case of the latter. A further chapter examines the suburbs of Wroclaw in Poland. Two chapters are based on emerging global cities from the Global South – Mexico City and Cape Town, while the final chapter focuses on post-suburban Toronto, Canada’s premier global city.

1.4 Neighbourhood and community

Despite or perhaps because of their notorious imprecision, ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘community’ remain basic conceptual building blocks within urban studies (Gottdiener and Budd, 2005; Blackshaw, 2010). Highprofile research and debates continue across sociology and urban studies regarding neighbourhood as community (Crow, 2002; The Sociological Review, 2005; Lupi and Musterd, 2006; Kusenbach, 2008; Smets and Kreuk, 2008; le Grand, 2010), neighbourhood effects (Bauder, 2002; Smets and Salman, 2008; Darcy, 2010; Slater, 2013) and neighbourhood-based urban policy (Martin, 2003; Beider, 2007; Smith et al., 2007; Wallace, 2010), to take just three topics. Furthermore, neighbourhood is a central element within both social geography and environmental psychology in relation to understanding and explaining people’s sense of attachment to place, defined as a ‘meaningful location’ (Cresswell, 2004; Lewicka, 2010, 2011).

But what do we mean by ‘neighbourhood’? It is usually taken to signify a locale having three socio-spatial features as highlighted in Talja Blokland’s definition: ‘a geographically circumscribed, built environment that people use practically and symbolically’ (2003: 213). Thus neighbourhood is

1.Spatial – it is a locally bounded place.

2.Social – it involves sets of social relations between neighbours.

3.Symbolic – it has an imaginative, symbolic component.

In relation to the first spatial aspect of neighbourhood, scale and boundaries are typically formulated fairly loosely, as for example in the following definitions:

Place and people, with the common sense limit as the area one can easily walk over.

(Morris and Hess, 1975: 6)

A limited territory within a larger urban area, where people inhabit dwellings and interact socially.

(Hallman, 1984: 13)

In research, population sizes of neighbourhood vary considerably, ranging from 1,000 to 30,000 people (Jenks and Dempsey, 2007: 161). Kusenbach (2006, 2008) has emphasized how patterns of day-to-day neighbouring can occur at various neighbourhood spatial scales, for example street blocks and walking-distance neighbourhoods. Others have suggested that the multi-scalar nature of neighbourhoods is less of a problem than might first appear (Martin, 2003). Maria Lewicka (2011) points to the paradox whereby despite neighbourhood’s often fuzzy boundaries, it forms the main scale at which place attachment is empirically examined rather than city, region or nation.

As the place attachment literature highlights, neighbourhoods are more than simply locations on a map (Lewicka, 2010, 2011). They mean something to their residents – even though there can be a lack of congruence over what that meaning might be. This emphasis on neighbourhood as a place with meaning brings us to the second (social) and third (symbolic) aspects of neighbourhood as mentioned above. Both aspects are frequently linked to the concept of community, central to which is ‘the idea that community concerns belonging’ (Delanty, 2003: 4; our emphasis). In fact, community ‘is sometimes used as a synonym [for neighbourhood]’ in urban studies (Davies and Herbert, 1993: 1).

This neighbourhood/community linkage is prominent in the community studies research tradition, which has its intellectual roots in social anthropology and helped to form the rich empirical bedrock of post-World War II urban and rural sociology (Young and Willmott, 1957; Gans, 1962; Frankenberg, 1969). This tradition continues today, albeit in more theoretically varied and self-reflexive forms (Phillipson and Thompson, 2008; Savage, 2008; Blackshaw, 2010). Thus, for example, there is increasing attention paid to how neighbourhood is enacted in the sense that neighbourhood-based social relations can emerge out of residents’ reactions to changing forms of urban governance and policy (Martin, 2003; Whitehead, 2004; Smets and Azarhoosh, 2014). As Martin (2003: 380) argues, ‘the concept of neighbourhood has salience when acted upon – when residents seek to protect or define neighbourhoods for some political and social purpose’. Communities at the spatial scale of the neighbourhood can indeed be strengthened by the presence of some external threat (Somerville, 2011). This has been one of the paradoxical effects of those urban policies which have explicitly attempted to ‘rejuvenate’ community in deprived urban neighbourhoods through the eradication of concentrated public/social housing estates and the creation of ‘mixed communities’ of homeowners alongside tenants (Smets, 2006; Smets and den Uyl, 2008; Bridge et al., 2012). Research has shown how the existing residents of public housing estates can themselves employ ‘community’ as a resource in their struggles to defend their homes and neighbourhood-based social networks – what they see as their place – against threats of demolition and displacement (Crookes, 2011; Glynn, 2011; Frediani et al., 2013; Watt, 2013a).

In addition to the social aspect of neighbourhood vis-à-vis community as interconnected sets of lived relations, there is also considerable attention paid to the third symbolic aspect of neighbourhood (Cohen, 1985). Just as the nation can be regarded as an ‘imagined community’, so the neighbourhood has imagined or symbolic features, as in Ray Pahl’s (2005) notion of a ‘community of the mind’. The analytical distinction between the lived and symbolic aspects of neighbourhoodas-community highlights how these two aspects need not necessarily empirically overlap, as seen in studies of low-income neighbourhoods which highlight contradictions between residents’ appreciation of their ongoing convivial neighbourly relations and their lament for a ‘decline’ or ‘loss’ of community (Watt, 2006; Eijk, 2012).

None of this is to say, however, that a sense of community (or place attachment which may occur on the basis of non-social, physical phenomena) should necessarily be limited to the neighbourhood spatial scale. Attachment to place can occur at a variety of geographical scales ranging from the home to the city, region and nation (Lewicka, 2011). Furthermore, community belonging is increasingly associated with proliferating ‘virtual communities’ as a result of contemporary globalized information technology (Delanty, 2003). Therefore, the axiomatic association of neighbourhood with a relatively homogeneous community, an association that remains a prominent rationale for contemporary urban policy (Wallace, 2010), conflates two analytical concepts which may, under certain circumstances, empirically overlap (Martin, 2003): ‘while physical proximity provides a specific context for neighbourly contacts, it does not determine their occurrence’ (Blokland, 2003: 47).

1.5 Residential neighbourhoods, place attachment and mobili...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Local and Transnational Everyday Practices in Four European Cities: Are New Barbarians on the Road?
• 3. Consumption Practices and Local Belonging Among Condominium Residents in Mexico City
• 4. Living in a(n) (un)Gated Community: Neighbourhood Belonging in Lisbon’s Parque das Nações
• 5. Belonging and Microsettings in a Rotterdam Housing Complex
• 6. Neighbours, Newcomers and Nation-Building: Producing Neighbourhood as Locality in a Post-Apartheid Cape Town Suburb
• 7. East London Mobilities: The ‘Cockney Diaspora’ and the Remaking of the Essex Ethnoscape
• 8. Teenagers’ Mobilities and Sense of Belonging in the Parisian Sensitive Urban Areas
• 9. Class, Community and Belonging in a ‘Chav Town’
• 10. Newcomers vs. Old-Timers? Community, Cooperation and Conflict in the Post-Socialist Suburbs of Wrocław, Poland
• 11. In-Between Mobility in Toronto’s New (Sub)urban Neighbourhoods
• Conclusion
• References
• Index