Abstract
Typing 'Alum Rock Birmingham' into the Google or YouTube search fields generates references to crime, gangs, cars, terrorism-related arrests and severe economic deprivation. At first sight few areas offer such a challenging context for testing whether diversity, equality and solidarity can be easily reconciled in contemporary cities. Yet an ongoing series of interviews with local residents in this area of east Birmingham, and related archival research, is uncovering richer and more complex stories. The main commercial artery, the Alum Rock Road, has been not just a major focus for potentially misleading representations of the locality as a 'no-go area', but a site of considerable emotional resonance. These deep-seated, often ambivalent attachments to place are woven into both personal and spatial biographies and tend to be overlooked in contemporary debates about social cohesion. These issues are focused through a series of representations of Alum Rock: a set of photographs taken for the Community Development Project in 1976, a 1970s local community newspaper, street art, an exhibition and recent YouTube videos. These sources illustrate how localities contain multiple 'subjugated knowledges' which need to be excavated, captured and articulated, for they form an integral part of the spatial biographies of places like Alum Rock.
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