Abstract
In this chapter we discuss our chosen geographies, revisiting both the super-diversity and gentrification debates. The chapter develops a nuanced account of different formations of gentrification and addresses the ways in which middle class-settlement in urban neighbourhoods converge—in a range of different ways—with super-diversity. We argue for the contradictory possibilities of encounters of difference; namely, what Les Back identified as the ‘metropolitan paradox’ and others have identified as the ways in which conflict and tension are integral to the unpredictable dynamics of conviviality as a social process and the lived experience of intense formations of difference in urban environments. We also discuss how Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and possible disruptions to the habitus could help us to understand perceptions of and reactions to diversity.
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Notes
- 1.
There are policy exceptions, however, e.g. Commission for Integration and Cohesion (2007) Our Shared Future.
- 2.
- 3.
The ‘bedroom tax’ was introduced in 2013, and involves a cut to housing benefit for those in social housing if they are deemed to have a spare room.
- 4.
We note here that the use of the binary ‘middle class’ and ‘working class’ has limitations. First, it overlooks class fractions within these broad groupings (see Vincent and Ball 2006) and, second, such a binary overlooks the existence of the intermediate category about which there is relatively little research (see Vincent 2017).
- 5.
Bourdieu’s theorising is relational, thus Bourdieu’s ‘key concepts of habitus and field designate bundles of relations’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 16, original emphasis). Habitus realises itself in relation to field. Social life is composed of many different ‘fields and sub fields’—such as education, politics, law—‘an ensemble of relatively autonomous spheres of “play” [action]… Each field prescribes its particular values and possesses its own regulative principles. These principles delimit a socially structured space in which agents struggle, depending on the position they occupy in that space, either to change or to preserve its boundaries and form’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 17). As Noble (2013b, p. 352) observes, fields are both abstractions (e.g. the field of education) and arranged around particular physical institutions and settings (e.g. schools, colleges, homes, in the case of the field of education). Within these, individuals use their available social, cultural and economic capitals in a struggle for advantage in particular fields. Every individual has a ‘portfolio’ of capital (Crossley 2008) that can present itself in three main forms: economic (money and assets), social capital (social relationships and networks, which Bourdieu emphasised can be used by some to perpetuate existing privilege), and cultural capital which can itself take three forms, embodied (‘in the form of long lasting dispositions of the mind and body’; Bourdieu 1997, p. 47), the objectified (cultural goods, such as books, pictures) and the institutionalised (qualifications).
- 6.
Atkinson (2010, p. 9) defines the lifeworld as partially constituted by the habitus but is distinct from it and notes that the two can ‘jar’ if the ‘conditions and experiences of the latter shift too rapidly’ (2010, p. 10). We can see an example of this in the (rare) attitudes of refusal of difference and (more common) avoidance of difference in Chaps. 6 and 7.
So, two agents close in social space have individual lifeworlds insofar as they attended different schools, have different occupations and workplaces, live in different neighborhoods, and have had and have different consociates – not just because of their membership of different fields – and thus have distinctive experiences, biographies, and habitus, but because all these facets of the lifeworld are structured to some degree according to material conditions of existence, they and the experiences and habitus they generate display clear analogies or, to use Wittgenstein’s (1952) phrase, “family resemblances,” which are, as Bourdieu so astutely noted, perceived by the agents themselves as a sense of social similarity (they are “like me” or “one of us”).’ (pp. 9–10)
- 7.
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Vincent, C., Neal, S., Iqbal, H. (2018). Encounter, Conviviality and the City: New Directions in Theorising Interaction Across Difference. In: Friendship and Diversity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73001-1_2
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