HSA Special Issue: Housing in “Hard Times”: Marginality, Inequality and Class

Abstract

This paper reasserts the relationship between class and housing through a sociological exploration of working-class place attachment, against the backdrop of a recession and government “disinvestment” in social housing. These are hard times for housing and harder still if you are working class. Interest in working-class lives within sociological research has declined; meanwhile, place attachment is deemed a middle-class proclivity of “elective belonging”: a source of place-based identity in response to ontological insecurity. I draw from an ethnographic exploration of Partick, Glasgow to demonstrate how working-class residents express strong “elective belonging” in financially and ontologically insecure times yet, paradoxically, their ability to stay physically “fixed” to place is weakened. I argue that working-class place attachment is broadly characterized by strong “elective belonging” and poor “elective fixity”: choice and control over one’s ability to stay fixed within their neighbourhood.