Belonging in working-class neighbourhoods: dis-identification, territorialisation and biographies of people and place

This article draws on repeated, biographical interviews with 18 households to explore how people construct a sense of belonging in two post-industrial neighbourhoods in the ‘ordinary’ urban areas of Grimsby and Sheffield, UK. It argues that experiences of low-paid, precarious work undermine the historic role that employment has played in identity construction for many individuals, and that places perform a crucial function in anchoring people’s lives and identities. Three active processes in the generation of belonging are elaborated. Through identification, dis-identification and the micro-differentiation of space, people constructed places in order to belong with others ‘like them’. Residents also internalised the symbolic logics of places through their daily movement, territorialising space as they learned how to be in particular environments. Finally, places were temporally situated within relational biographies and experienced in relation to past and imagined futures. Places fulfilled an important psycho-social function, anchoring people’s identities and generating a sense that they belonged.