IN-PERSON Lisbon Livable Cities. Section B

Abstract

The paper will outline how structural changes in the economy and social composition of Chatham in Kent, UK have impacted on working-class cultures, systems of social reproduction and residential patterns that grew up around the Chatham Dockyard. It will discuss how this longer-term structural transition interacts with processes of urban displacement, ‘non-voluntary’ mobilities and housing dynamics to create concentrations of poverty and deprivation alongside increasing population diversity and fragmentation at the neighbourhood level. Findings explore residents’ responses to these changes which have been exacerbated by austerity policies and declining state-support, and how these shape patterns of local social mobilisation. While neighbourhood mobilisation in higher-income areas centres on preserving or enhancing an areas’ positive aspects, in low-income areas it occurs more in response to chronic, ongoing problems. Unmet needs (health, collective security) are increasingly met through grassroots practices and protection mechanisms operating through local circuits of information that generate new forms of neighbourhood inclusion/exclusion. The demise of older social control mechanisms that accompanied closure of the area’s community spaces and the breaking up of the relatively homogeneous working-class population that characterised the town during its industrial era, had been partly compensated by informal methods of policing and vigilantism. These were a growing presence in the neighbourhood in reaction to rising lawlessness, street-crime and the inaction of police and local-authorities to address residents’ concerns. Findings indicate the potential for local collective action and a research agenda that transcends ethnic/migratory status to encompass relationships of ‘commonplace diversity’ and the ‘ethos of mixing’, as well as conflicts and hostilities made visible in terms of difference (Wessendorf 2013).