Stories of Cosmopolitan Belonging

Emotion and Location

Hannah Jones, Emma Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317684916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

What does it mean to belong in a place, or more than one place? This exciting new volume brings together work from cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholars researching home, migration and belonging, using their original research to argue for greater attention to how feeling and emotion is deeply embedded in social structures and power relations.

Stories of Cosmopolitan Belonging argues for a practical cosmopolitanism that recognises relations of power and struggle, and that struggles over place are often played out through emotional attachment. Taking the reader on a journey through research encounters spiralling out from the global city of London, through English suburbs and European cities to homes and lives in Jamaica, Puerto Rico and Mexico, the contributors show ways in which international and intercontinental migrations and connections criss-cross and constitute local places in each of their case studies.

With a reflection on the practice of 'writing cities' from two leading urbanists and a focus throughout the volume on empirical work driving theoretical elaboration, this book will be essential reading for those interested in the politics of social science method, transnational urbanism, affective practices and new perspectives on power relations in neoliberal times. The international range of linked case studies presented here will be a valuable resource for students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, urban studies, cultural studies and contemporary history, and for urban policy makers interested in innovative perspectives on social relations and urban form.

PART I

Local worlds/cosmopolitan formations

London and/in the world

1

EMOTION, LOCATION AND URBAN REGENERATION

The resonance of marginalised cosmopolitanisms

Suzanne M. Hall

Introduction: The emotional resonance of marginalized places

What are the interplays between emotion, location and urban regeneration? I focus on a ‘marginal’ inner city area and connect the cultural resonance of location, with how emotions advance certain trajectories of urban renewal. The place in question is Walworth, an inner city south London neighbourhood described across official, media and on-the-ground sources as deprived and ethnically diverse. By contrasting the emotional registers of ‘estate’ and ‘street’ within the same place, I explore side-by-side forms of marginalisation and cosmopolitanism, where relegation and prospect, and containment and mixing abide together. While this chapter acknowledges the intensely discriminatory processes of territorial stigmatization through both ghettoisation and marginalisation, it engages with the different spaces of ‘estate’ and ‘street’ to deviate from the discourse of absolute relegation and segregation. Rather, this chapter engages emotion to explore the resonance between affect and effect: how feelings about places are proliferated between spheres of power and everyday life. I draw on Sara Ahmed’s (2004) essential conceptualisation of ‘emotionality’, tracing how emotions are circulated, accumulated and how they endure or ‘stick’. My aim is to connect how the emotionality of stigmatised places secures distinctive paths for urban regeneration. In failing to consider the urban poor in visions of a prosperous urban future, regeneration by dispossession ultimately advances limited prospects for cosmopolitan belonging.

Walworth is an inner city place that is physically proximate to yet culturally distanced from central London. It is a mark on the map of south London close enough to the centre to catch glimpses of the London Eye and to hear the chimes of Big Ben, while remaining distant from the cultural register of urban prestige and ‘World Class’ prospect to its immediate north. A ten-minute red double-decker bus journey from the north of Walworth takes you to the recently regenerated Southbank Centre, where festivals, skateboarding, Public Space and Public Art aggregate in the palpable presence of the successful, cosmopolitan city: ‘The complex, one of the trendiest in London … is truly multicultural and cosmopolitan’ (www.tripadvisor.co.uk 2013). By contrast, Walworth offers a somewhat different trope of cosmopolitanism, an altogether different mix of class and ethnicity, with an emotional register of a more down-at-heel place. Despite Walworth’s vast cultural distance from the Southbank Centre’s orbit, Walworth is an extremely well-located, inner city location with a number of sizeable, strategic pieces of publicly owned land. Large-scale regeneration is therefore on the cards for Walworth: two of its social housing estates, the Heygate and the Aylesbury, are being regenerated; and plans to transform the Elephant and Castle public transport interchange and its associated shopping centre are underway.

As regeneration efforts emerge in Walworth, it is instructive to explore the links between emotional affect and political effect: how the emotive impressions attributed to a place come to be shared, and how these feelings advance certain trajectories of urban regeneration. I use the two different spaces of the social housing estate and the high street to explore overlapping but different processes of urban renewal. Through the estate, I focus on the persistent relegation of Walworth through the emotionally charged trope of deprivation, and how this sponsors a morally charged trope of intervention and urban redevelopment. But the narrative of urban marginality that I explore is arguably less predictable than the inevitable decline abetted by the advanced marginalisation attributed to the ghetto (Wacquant 2007). For Walworth has layers of life that lie below the radar of official scrutiny; a host of possibilities and animations that are able to exist precisely because they are rendered invisible by the authorised mask of ‘deprivation’. Territorial stigmatisation frequently reveals a highly mediated process of relegation that coincides with processes of regeneration, displacement and gentrification (Smith 2002). Less visible in the gentrification literature, however, is that the stigma effect potentially also produces a mask whereby other processes of diversification emerge below the surface. In Walworth, this is particularly evident during fallow regeneration cycles, when there is limited interference from the market or state.

As a local resident of Walworth from 2004 to 2010, during which time I undertook an ethnography of the Walworth Road (Hall 2012), I became aware of a complex urban marginality, where historic cycles of limited economic growth were iteratively followed by economic booms and targeted regeneration. These cyclical economic periods have led to an urban landscape of complex marginality, where relegation intersects with prospect, and where class intersects with pronounced ethnic diversity sustained by periods of urban migration. In the last half century Walworth has incurred two large-scale processes of regeneration with no significant state-led redevelopment between the two periods. Authorised regeneration in the 1960s and 1970s took the form of en masse social housing provision together with the rationalisation of the Elephant and Castle transport interchange. Statefacilitated regeneration since 2008 involves a process of dismantling the same en masse housing estates and over-determined transport interchange, in the process releasing substantial redevelopment opportunities to the open market. However, state-led or state-facilitated regeneration endeavours coexist, even if uncomfortably, with much smaller, much more diverse and ongoing acts of urban renewal. The exploration of a complex urban marginality through the spaces of ‘estate’ and ‘street’ arguably leads to a more cluttered view of urban marginalisation. It is therefore possible to trace the registers of relegation imposed on the urban poor in Walworth, alongside practices of border crossings across containments of class, ethnicity and demotion, where alternative, albeit less visible, cultural registers emerge.

To explore how the spaces of ‘estate’ and ‘street’ are rendered culturally visible, I directly draw on Ahmed’s (2004) three processes by which emotions are socially produced. Emotions circulate by moving ‘outside in’: meanings are impressed from the outside onto objects and texts, and buildings and places, gradually acquiring and resonating a social measure of value. Individuals read the social ‘worth’ of these symbols, interpreting and responding to their social value. Emotions accumulate, their increase in shared impact secured through the distribution, repetition and subsequent inflation of affect or cultural reach. Emotions endure, they ‘stick’, creating a shared, intractable response to objects, people and places. Through tracing the circulation, accumulation and endurance of collectively shared emotions, Ahmed shows that the power of emotion in making and securing collective meaning is that it is evoked before it is rationalised. To add to Ahmed’s ‘emotionality’ I trace the role of emotions in the transformation of buildings and places, and how the power of emotion is used to gain cultural momentum for political traction. The collective feelings associated with the scale, shape, mass and texture of built form is used to project an attitude to objects, people and places, thereby procuring legitimation for intervention or regeneration.

This chapter focuses on the work that emotion does in defining place, by tracing the circulation, accumulation, endurance and transformative potential of affect in the making and remaking of Walworth. Two related questions guide the analysis: first, how do the attributes of a place socially circulate; ‘what sticks’ in the shared impressions of a place? And second, what modes of urban transformation do the place-oriented impressions of deprivation and diversity sponsor? Emotionality, I argue, allows us to see the ‘social syntax’ of place: the emotive political and cultural constructions of territories, people and objects that come to register a public or shared sense of place. The register opens up fertile ground for further emotive claims as to how and why certain places require ‘fixing’. Regeneration claims often result in further withdrawals of state investment from a place, thereby compounding segregation by class and race. However, in the seemingly simplistic analogy of cheek-by-jowl ‘estate’ and ‘street’ the significant narrative of a complex urban marginality emerges. The histories of urban poverty formation intersect with those of urban migration and the cultural diversification of the city, arguably most pronounced in London’s most deprived areas. In the two sections that follow I focus on the cultural resonance of estate and street, to trace varied forms of belonging alongside varied practices of urban renewal.

The registers of relegation: Estate

We lived in Peckham, in a council house my family, big family. We had a garden, we had a dog, and then when I was five years old the council decided to regenerate Peckham and they tore all those houses down. I mean it was miles and miles of, of, council housing, and destroyed the communities that lived there and built the notorious North Peckham Estate, which was opened in the 70s. So what really happened was the tight-knit kind of community that I first lived in was just literally destroyed overnight. I mean it was a terrible, terrible thing that happened to the area. I don’t think the area ever recovered, because since then, as you know, they have regenerated Peckham again, by tearing down the North Peckham Estate. So what I say is, ‘What Hitler failed to do during the Blitz, Southwark Council have done twice in my life-time.’ (laughs) … My grandparents ended up in Wood Dene in Peckham, which is now about to be, at last, demolished. We called it ‘The Kremlin’, and in fact the bus conductor used to say, ‘anyone for the Kremlin?’ and we used to jump off the bus. It was awful. A horror estate … Big double page spread in ‘The South London Press’ about horror estates.

(John, self-proclaimed ‘social housing tenant’, Interview 2007)

There is surely no form of architectural invention in the UK so intensely the object of heart-felt grievance (Hanley 2007), literary degradation (Amis 1989), social analysis (Power 1987) and ongoing official intervention than the modernist social housing estate. The cultural notoriety of this singularly symbolic spatial and social form has, as John’s words above show, subjected the diverse inhabitants of en masse housing estates to repetitive iterations of displacement, demolition and renewal. How are these disruptive repetitions justified as ‘regeneration’? Ahmed refers to ‘processes of intensification’ (2004: 45) where the emotive currency of an object or issue is publicly heightened, even exaggerated, to induce pronounced, shared emotional reactions. Although these reactions may be individually felt, they are widely procured, circulated and maintained through highly emotive symbols. John refers to his grandparents’ fortification in Wood Dene through the symbol of ‘The Kremlin’, whilst other council inhabitants in an east London housing estate refer to their place of residence as ‘Alcatraz’, evoking imprisonment rather than residence (Foster 1995). As Ahmed suggests, highly emotive symbols – in this case fortification and imprisonment – travel ‘outside in’ through permeating broader societal registers, acquiring widespread connotations, and resonating in the perceptions of housing estate residents. Finally, emotive symbols serve to justify targeted political interventions. It is instructive to trace the emergence of stigma or what Goffman aptly refers to as ‘the management of spoiled identity’ (1963) through spatial symbols, and to connect stigma to Ahmed’s ‘emotionality’ through how emotions are socially produced in the mass and materiality of social housing estates.

Until recently, there were three large-scale social housing estates adjacent to Walworth Road that together provided some 5,000 social housing units. The diverse individuals and families of the Heygate, Aylesbury and Brandon estates were able to benefit from comparatively affordable housing within close proximity to good public transportation links, an array of public amenities and inner city work opportunities. To deflate the overextended association of ‘sink’ estates with ‘low life’ inhabitants (Haylett 2001), it is important to note that social housing estates in London typically aggregate a comparatively wide economic mix of inhabitants, and historically have provided state-subsidised and affordable housing opportunities in a city where property values continue to dramatically increase, despite the current impact of the global economic crisis. Substantial proportions of Great Britain’s twentieth-century housing were provided through publicly rented housing stock, reaching a climax in 1979 where 32 per cent of housing was publicly rented (Stone 2003: 14). A significant number of highly diverse individuals lived, and continue to live, in social housing.

But well outside this sanguine perspective, two of the three social housing estates within Walworth – the Aylesbury and Heygate estates – are recipients of heightened stigmata. The Aylesbury, located halfway down the Walworth Road, was described in the press on the dawn of its recent regeneration, as ‘hell’s waiting room’, a literal demonisation that in an evocative swipe denigrates the diverse residents of the Aylesbury (Muir 2005). How is it that the monolithic forms of the estate are all too readily translatable into reductive social monoliths? Built in 1963 and comprising 2,700 units, the Aylesbury was the largest housing estate in Europe within one contained area. The sheer scale of the development was matched with individual building mass, and the 120 metre block of housing along Thurlow Street has the dubious honour of being the longest prefabricated stretch of housing in the UK (Boast 2005). The Heygate estate, located to the north of the Walworth Road and adjacent to the strategic public transport interchange at the Elephant and Castle, was built between 1970 and 1974 and comprised of 1,194 units. Providing well-located inner city housing to diverse individuals, this estate too is relegated in the media as ‘a concrete warren … with a grim r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Fm Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Plates
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Moving and being moved
• Reflections Writing cities
• Part I Local worlds/cosmopolitan formations London and/in the world
• Part II Places that don't exist England(s) and elsewheres
• Part III Displacement, its aftermaths and futures Tracing connection to, from and through Europe
• Part IV Cosmopolitanism in the home North American belongings
• Index