The spaces of everyday life

Author(s):  
James Greenhalgh

Building on the conclusions and individual agency highlighted in the last chapter, this chapter uses examples of the clashes between local government and inhabitants on the social housing estates of Manchester and Hull to show how the practices of everyday life could subvert and challenge the spatial practices of urban governance, shedding light on the lived experience and agency of the inhabitants of mid-twentieth-century social housing. Expectations about how certain spaces should function, what it was appropriate to do in them and the beneficial outcomes they were supposed to produce meant mapping certain expectations about how societies and individuals interacted onto places like parks, grass verges or community centres. Corporations’ and planners’ perceptions of how space should function is thus used here to demonstrate how spatial policies evidenced governmental anxieties over working-class association, concerns about suburban anomie and a growing disquiet about youth and delinquency.

Author(s):  
Michael P. Roller

The conclusion revisits the three major inquiries addressed in the text, drawing together the evidence and contexts provided in the previous seven chapters. The first investigates the role of objective settings, such as the systemic and symbolic violence of landscapes and semiotic systems of racialization in justifying or triggering moments of explicit subjective violence such as the Lattimer Massacre. The second inquiry, traces the trajectory of immigrant groups into contemporary patriotic neoliberal subjects. In other terms, it asks how an oppressed group can become complicit with oppression later in history. The third inquiry traces the development of soft forms of social control and coercion across the longue durée of the twentieth century. Specifically, it asks how vertically integrated economic and governmental structures such as neoliberalism and governmentality which serve to stabilize the social antagonisms of the past are enunciated in everyday life.


2021 ◽  
pp. 413-436
Author(s):  
Paul Watt

The concluding chapter summarises the key findings and suggests policy recommendations. Part I delineated the pernicious impacts of neoliberalism and austerity on public/social housing in London, and analysed the role that estate demolition has played. Part II cast a sociological gaze not only at how working-class housing, lives and spaces are materially deprived and symbolically devalued by powerful external forces (neoliberalism and austerity), but also at how such housing, lives and spaces become valued and valuable. This emphasis on positive values corrects those policy perspectives that view estates through the epistemologically narrow lens of quantitative area-based deprivation indices. In comparative urbanism terms, London social housing estates remain substantially different from the anomic, often dangerous spaces of urban marginality such as US public housing projects (Wacquant). Part III focused on residents’ experiences of living through regeneration. It demonstrated how the valuation/devaluation duality tilts around in terms of place belonging. Comprehensive redevelopment diminishes the valued aspects of estates, while the devalued aspects are heightened and eventually dominate. The book provides several policy recommendations and research agendas. Demolition-based regeneration schemes inevitably result in state-led gentrification, but refurbishment-only schemes have the potential to improve estates and residents’ lives.


1970 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 303-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter N. Stearns

Historians, in their somewhat defensive perusal of sociology for sweeping theoretical statements, perhaps underestimate the careful, often narrow, empiricism of much sociological research. Sociologists unearth facts for subsequent historians to work on and sometimes to interpret more broadly. Historical sociologists to the contrary, fact-grubbing services are mutual in the two disciplines. German sociologists were the first to study the social effects of industrialization extensively. By the early twentieth century, when masses of workers were still entering factory industry for the first time, sociologists were ready to investigate the process of adaptation through systematic interviews. British researchers in the same period, besides being dedicated amateurs for the most part, focused on the urban poor and on material conditions too exclusively still. French efforts were even more scattered. Maurice Halbwachs did some valuable studies of consumption patterns, while Le Play and his school contributed rather conservative portraits of individual workers. For purposes of understanding the working class in manufacturing, German sociological research was long unrivaled.


2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
JEFF MEEK

ABSTRACTThe social and economic position of lodgers in Europe and North America has attracted considerable scholarship, yet the financial and interpersonal relationships between lodgers and boarders and their hosts in working-class homes is somewhat underdeveloped. This article examines patterns of lodging and boarding in working-class homes in Scotland between 1861 and 1911, focusing upon multiple layers of connection between paying guests and householders. This article demonstrates that connections had national and ethnic roots, and that taking in lodgers and boarders was of prime cultural and economic importance for many. The ability to offer space played a crucial role in the social and economic status of single, separated and widowed women, and this article offers an insight into the sometimes troubled relationships between landladies and their tenants.


Urban History ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICK HAYES

ABSTRACTWith few dissenting voices, the historiography of twentieth-century urban civil society has been relayed through a prism of continuing and escalating elite disengagement. Within a paradigm of declinism, academics, politicians and social commentators contrast a past offering a richness of social commitment against a present characterized by lowering standards in urban governance. Put simply, the right sorts of people were no longer volunteering. Yet the data for such claims is insubstantial, and the applied methodology flawed. What are lacking are detailed empirical studies which offer flexible measures of status across a range of voluntary and political activities, so that we can better understand the social trends of urban volunteering across the first 50 years of the twentieth century.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3 (27)) ◽  
pp. 159-162
Author(s):  
Mikhail V. Shilovsky

The review provides a detailed analysis of the research of doctor of science S.G. Sizov, dedicated to the daily life of Omsk during the Civil war. It is noted that the author, using archival materials and a large volume of various periodicals, was able to give a detailed picture of everyday life in Omsk during one of the most difficult periods in the history of Russia in the twentieth century, when the city became the White capital of Russia. Despite some omissions, according to the reviewer, the monograph makes a valuable contribution to the study of everyday life not only in Omsk, but throughout Russia during the social cataclysm of 1917-1920.


2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-20
Author(s):  
Ian Law ◽  
Jenny Simms ◽  
Ala Sirriyeh

Despite increasing understanding of, information about and official commitment to challenge these patterns, racist hostility and violence continue to have an enduring presence in urban and rural life in the UK. This indicates the paradoxical nature of this racial crisis and challenges for antiracism as a political project. This paper charts how these issues play out at the local level through an examination of a five year process from problem identification through to research, response, action and aftermath from 2006 to 2012 in the city of Leeds, UK, with a focus on two predominantly white working class social housing estates in the city. We explore how embedded tensions and antagonisms can begin to be challenged, while examining how the contemporary climate of austerity and cuts in services, together with prevailing post-racial thinking, make the likelihood of such concerted action in the UK increasingly remote.


2012 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Massimo Bricocoli ◽  
Elena Marchigiani

Significant ageing processes are affecting many regions across Europe and are changing the social and spatial profile of cities. In Trieste, Italy, a joint initiative by the public Health Agency and the Social Housing Agency has developed a programme targeting conditions that allow people to age at home. The outcomes of the programme stress the need to redesign and reorganise the living environment as a way to oppose to the institutionalisation of older people in specialised nursing homes. Based on intensive field work, this contribution presents and discusses the original and innovative inputs that the case study is offering to the Italian and European debate.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document