Everyone knew everyone: diversity, community memory and a new established–outsider figuration

Abstract

This article explores the transformation of a community and its diversity as narrated by former industrial workers from a neighbourhood in Nuremberg, in a context in which company-based social housing of workers had been replaced by private rented accommodation accessed by middle class residents of migrant backgrounds. In biographical interviews, narratives emerge in which diversity and social difference are not seen as ethnic difference, but rather as a power difference within an established–outsider figuration. In this figuration, heterogeneous past and present cultural practices are homogenised through community control and regulation along normative rules as defined by the established. Workers’ nostalgic laments for the loss of their former status show that figuration of established and outsiders is dynamic, opening up new ways of thinking about diverse place-making and alternative perspectives on urban gentrification.