Placing self and Other: Imaginaries of urban diversity and productive discontent

Abstract

The white working-class resident living in increasingly multi-ethnic urban neighbourhoods is a key trope in debates around migrant integration and national identity in Western Europe. Such residents are imagined to feel out of place due to the influx of migrants in ‘their’ neighbourhoods. This paper engages with the anxiety, discontent, and resentment experienced by a sub-set of residents in a multi-ethnic neighbourhood in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. I show how these emotions are grounded in everyday interactions with ‘Others’ but also stem from residents' placed subjectivities: perceptions of the self in relation to symbolic and material geographies of the city and the nation. Placed subjectivities in turn informed how residents were (not) able to deal with difference. While some residents demonstrated a by now familiar rhetoric of discontent, others developed new ways of interacting with place and defining their own position, despite their discomfort. These ‘productive discontents’ might allow for small-scale and ambivalent forms of neighbouring across difference.