Middle-class Residents Research Articles

Social mix in Zagreb’s large housing estates

In Western and Northern Europe, post-war large housing estates (LHEs) stand out as areas of segregated and minority-populated housing, and have faced numerous attempts of reconstruction with the idea of social mixing. LHEs in Central and Eastern Europe had different developmental pathways. The heterogeneous structure of these estates has persisted until today, but due to the systematic neglect and aging, the estates are threatened by physical and social deterioration. The analysis is based on a survey conducted in Croatia in 2022 on two types of housing estates (socialist and post-socialist; N (Zagreb = 657). The results confirm that the social composition in both types of estates is mixed, with a predominance of middle-class residents and without pronounced social differences. The residential satisfaction is high, so the majority of residents are stayers. Nevertheless, certain regeneration policies should be adopted because the population of the socialist LHEs is aging, which could jeopardize the present heterogeneity and make maintenance of multifamily buildings more challenging, thus contributing to further deterioration of the estates.

Invisible fish: The selective (dis)connection of elite Chinese gated community residents from urban public space

Gated communities remain identified with strong forms of socio-physical segregation, yet there has been relatively light engagement with the question of how their residents engage with the city more broadly. This relationship, of protected privacy to open public space, is important because segregation is found in modes of mobility as well as in fixed residential spaces. This article contributes to the understanding of mobile forms of segregation by examining the use of public space, and sites of work, leisure and city services, by the (upper) middle-class residents of two high-end gated communities in Zhanjiang, a middle-tier Chinese city. In these relatively new elite residential spaces, newly status-conscious inhabitants reveal how their use of private modes of travel, avoidance of public transportation systems and efforts at seamless traversal of urban spaces connect to ideas of social achievement. Through extensive qualitative fieldwork in these two sites, we are granted a privileged insight into the ways in which China’s nascent middle classes utilise shielded addresses from which to access what they see as status-conferring lifestyle and taste destinations through private modes of mobility.

Stadtschmerz: Stories of Loss and Guilt in Times of Gentrification

This essay detects a genre of non-fiction, which it coins as Stadtschmerz. In this genre, middle class residents who experience alienation due to gentrification turn this experience into stories of loss and guilt (for being the target group of gentrification). This essay explores four canonical texts of Stadtschmerz from the mid-19th century to the present; the authors explore the gentrifying city as flâneurs and report on their findings in a feuilleton. As such, the essay shows how through expressing Stadtschmerz the middle-class attempts to cope with the making of the middle-class city. In this way, Stadtschmerz neutralizes the positionality of the writer and his readership within processes of gentrification. Furthermore, it offers readers voyeurism into the lives of the displaced lower classes. Lastly, Stadtschmerz processes middle-class anxiety amid gentrification. A deconstructive analysis of Stadtschmerz tells us that the experience of gentrification is above all a hot topic for the middle-class itself.

Energy management system for a small town to enhance quality of life

Abstract The study proposes a simplified energy management system (EMS) that can be a useful tool for small towns with a majority of middle-class residents who are looking to improve their quality of life while lowering energy expenditures and having a smaller environmental effect. This article examines the advantages of setting up an EMS in a small community and offers guidance on how to do so. The system is composed of a wind turbine and a gas turbine. The latter can be fueled either from natural gas or from biogas. The system has been implemented in Matlab/Simulink and executed with real-world data that is publicly available. The research presented in this article can assist small towns in developing an environmentally friendly EMS that will improve citizens’ quality of life, where the results have shown continuity of service for the system over many hours with cheap or even free electricity.

Defensive Development Against Disinvestment: Early Black Gentrification in the History of Fort Greene, Brooklyn

Studies of early gentrification have largely focused on cases of White gentrifiers in predominately White and Latinx low-income neighborhoods, which has overlooked the role of the Black middle-class and the presence of Black gentrifiers in early gentrification. In this article, we document the role of the Black middle-class in early gentrification in 1970s Fort Greene, Brooklyn, demonstrating their role in a “defensive development” strategy to protect the neighborhood from state-led demolition-style urban renewal. The Fort Greene Landmarks Preservation Committee, a Black, middle-class led coalition of multi-racial, middle-class residents pursued historic designation to preserve the multi-racial and predominately Black, mixed-income neighborhood from further demolition from urban renewal and disinvestment from redlining. Our findings confirm that early Black gentrification, like tract contemporary Black gentrification can both provide temporary protections for the Black community and lead to further gentrification.

Research on the mechanism involved in urban social inclusiveness and resident entrepreneurship: Evidence from China

During the urbanization process in China, issues such as the widening wealth gap, class stratification, and social exclusion influenced residents' decisions to pursue entrepreneurship. Inclusiveness is an inevitable trend in new urbanization, and it is also a key factor in promoting residents' entrepreneurship and stimulating the potential for social innovation. Based on three key principles, “fairness, openness, and sharing, “ this paper assesses the relationship, and the internal mechanism driving the relationship, between urban social inclusiveness and resident entrepreneurship. This includes constructing an urban social inclusiveness index, and analyzing data from the 2018 China General Social Survey (CGSS). The key results indicate that urban social inclusiveness has a significant positive effect on resident entrepreneurship. The mechanism analysis shows that urban social inclusiveness can improve the probability of residents being entrepreneurial, by improving risk attitude, promoting class mobility, and expanding social networks. Heterogeneity analysis shows that urban social inclusiveness has a significant impact on the entrepreneurial of local residents, and low-class and high-class residents; urban social inclusiveness has no significant impact on the entrepreneurial choice of transient residents and middle-class residents. Besides, urban social inclusiveness plays a more significant role in promoting residents' choice of survival entrepreneurship, compared with opportunistic entrepreneurship.

Gentrification of Trusmi Batik Cirebon

This study aims to photograph the immigration of middle-class residents to urban areas that are in poor condition or have recently been refurbished or modernized. This study uses a qualitative approach to see the phenomenon of Trusmi Village as the heart of batik production in Cirebon. They involve thousands of batik artisans working daily from residents of Trusmi village and its surroundings, such as Gamel, Kaliwulu, Wotgali, and KaliTengah. Shops and showrooms showcase artisans' finest products along 1.5 kilometers of Trusmi Street. Batik showrooms in the form of shops line the village streets in various sizes and shapes. UNESCO recognizes Indonesian Batik as one of the intangible world cultural heritage. Ironically, the wages of batik artisans are meager. Due to labor shortages, about 60 percent of the 360 batik SME industries in Cirebon Regency have gone out of business in the last five years. Old artisan mothers dominate the batik-making centers in Trusmi Village over the age of 4

Brand Loyalty and Customer Retention Among Pharmaceutical Distributors in Lagos State, Nigeria

Studies on brand loyalty posit that customers are motivated by factors external and internal to them. The former deals with items driven by brand makers and intermediate partnership; the latter is driven by cognitive and behavioral disposition. Against this backdrop, the study was conducted to examine moderating role of physician and pharmaceutical distributors in customer brand loyalty in Ikeja-Lagos. The study adopted descriptive survey, 25 sample size and qualitative method. Key informant interviews and semi structure interview were used as instrument of data collection. Study population consisted of middle class residents, who were brand customers, and pharmacy stores. Moderating role of physicians and brand customers in pharmacy stores were dominantly influenced by doctor’s prescriptions, history of illness, satisfaction and trust. Purchase intention of customers was driven by attachment and commitment to doctor’s brand prescription. Satisfaction predicted trust. Brand medicine which offered satisfaction was retained whether or not the price changed upward. Trust for brand depended on consistent satisfaction and this significantly predicted loyalty. Pharmacy distributors had little capacity to change purchase intention. Brand decision was predicted by moderating role of physician. This study recommended that the role of physicians should be mainstreamed in brand patronage in pharmaceutical distribution. Loyalty to brand was predicted by customer knowledge of efficacy in disease history. Physician intervention was valued by customers.

Social media analysis reveals environmental injustices in Philadelphia urban parks

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 11.7 calls for access to safe and inclusive green spaces for all communities. Yet, historical residential segregation in the USA has resulted in poor quality urban parks near neighborhoods with primarily disadvantaged socioeconomic status groups, and an extensive park system that addresses the needs of primarily White middle-class residents. Here we center the voices of historically marginalized urban residents by using Natural Language Processing and Geographic Information Science to analyze a large dataset (n = 143,913) of Google Map reviews from 2011 to 2022 across 285 parks in the City of Philadelphia, USA. We find that parks in neighborhoods with a high number of residents from historically disadvantaged demographic groups are likely to receive lower scores on Google Maps. Physical characteristics of these parks based on aerial and satellite images and ancillary data corroborate the public perception of park quality. Topic modeling of park reviews reveal that the diverse environmental justice needs of historically marginalized communities must be met to reduce the uneven park quality—a goal in line with achieving SDG 11 by 2030.

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Rebecca K. Marchiel. After Redlining: The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Financial Deregulation.

After Redlining is an important contribution to the robust literature on twentieth century US housing policy and divestment from America’s cities. Focusing on the period between the late 1960s and mid-1980s—between the urban uprisings and the triumph of financial deregulation—Rebecca K. Marchiel explores how the National People’s Action (NPA), a loose federation of neighborhood organizations composed of white, Black, and Latinx working- and middle-class residents, sought “better versions” of federal housing programs (89), first through base-building, power-mapping, and social movement campaigns, and later by lobbying their allies in Congress. The book is also about the changing banking landscape in post-1970s America. Marchiel traces the development of “financial common sense,” the belief that because banks were different from “typical for-profit firms” (5), they had an obligation to extend credit to communities in which they did business. Inculcated by the New Deal and reinforced by postwar popular culture, by the late 1960s, this financial common sense ran up against the vanishing act of local banks and their unwillingness to issue new mortgages. As neighborhoods began to “transition,” a euphemism for the arrival of Black and brown residents in white urban enclaves, local savings and loan associations either reneged on their obligation or decided that since access to “their services … hinged on whiteness,” the compact had been broken by the settlement of clients they were never intended to serve (42, 45).

Revisiting the established-outsider constellation in a gentrifying majority-minority neighbourhood

ABSTRACT The phenomenon of majority-minority cities refers to increasingly ethnically diverse neighbourhoods where everybody belongs to a minority group.Simultaneously, another phenomenon parallels this majority-minority formation and that is gentrification, leading to an inflow of white middle-class residents into neighbourhoods which were previously predominantly occupied by residents with a migration background. Neighbourhoods that 30 years ago experienced a ‘white-flight’ and were subsequently almost exclusively inhabited by migrants and their descendants are now experiencing a ‘comeback’ of young urban professionals and middle-class young families who purchase (un)affordable housing in these gentrifying neighbourhoods. This creates an interesting condition for not only the migrants, but also their descendants who were often born and raised in these neighbourhoods and have lived there for over 30 years. Using Elias and Scotson’s established–outsiders model, this article shows that, while claiming the neighbourhood as their own, descendants of migrants are experiencing a loss of their established status and feeling like an outsider in the face of the changes brought about by gentrification. Using semi-structured interviews with residents with and without a migration background, this article shows how gentrification has different implications for people living in majority-minority settings at the intersections of social class and ethnicity.

Co-existing structures of feeling: Senses and imaginaries of industrial neighbourhoods

This article explores how structures of feeling shape everyday life and local atmospheres in two industrial neighbourhoods located in the cities of Moscow and Yekaterinburg. Developing Raymond Williams’s concept of structure of feeling, I conceptualise it as an affective principle regulating sensual experiences, spatial imaginaries and practical activities of local communities within socio-material infrastructures. I argue that Soviet (socialist/industrial/residual) and post-Soviet (neoliberal/post-industrial/emergent) structures of feeling co-exist in senses, imaginaries and the landscapes of Russia’s deindustrialising urban areas. Working-class and long-standing middle-class residents show an affective attachment to place and tend to imagine their neighbourhoods with the help of an industrial structure of feeling comprising values of factory culture, communality and shared space, while an emergent structure of feeling is informed by values of neoliberal development, individual comfort and private space. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography in two locations, this article provides an empirically grounded theorisation of the concept of structure of feeling by bringing it in sociology of space and place and urban anthropology. It contributes to the debate about place attachment of deindustrialising communities and their vision of the past, present and future of their neighbourhoods by an extended understanding of structure of feeling not as a spirit of the time but as a multiple spirit of the time and place.

Understanding the interaction between human activities and physical health under extreme heat environment in Phoenix, Arizona.

Long-term community resilience, which privileges a long view look at chronic issues influencing communities, has begun to draw more attention from city planners, researchers and policymakers. In Phoenix, resilience to heat is both a necessity and a way of life. In this paper, we attempt to understand how residents living in Phoenix experience and behave in an extreme heat environment. To achieve this goal, we introduced a smartphone application (ActivityLog) to study spatio-temporal dynamics of human interaction with urban environments. Compared with traditional paper activity log results we have in this study, the smartphone-based activity log has higher data quality in terms of total number of logs, response rates, accuracy, and connection with GPS and temperature sensors. The research results show that low-income residents in Phoenix mostly stay home during the summer but experience a relatively high indoor temperature due to the lack/low efficiency of air-conditioning (AC) equipment or lack of funds to run AC frequently. Middle-class residents have a better living experience in Phoenix with better mobility with automobiles and good quality of AC. The research results help us better understand user behaviors for daily log activities and how human activities interact with the urban thermal environment, informing further planning policy development. The ActivityLog smartphone application is also presented as an open-source prototype to design a similar urban climate citizen science program in the future.

Prospects for Introducing Medium-Density Row Housing in Jeddah City

Architectural researchers ensure that residential buildings in any area are appropriately planned for the landscape and meet the needs of current and future residents. Row houses are well known in residential sectors of the United States and many European countries, but the data on row housing in Saudi Arabia is very limited. As residential structures, row houses are reasonably priced and architecturally resilient. They also fill the affordable housing gap for middle-class residents – sometimes called the “missing middle” – in major urban centers such as Jeddah. Like other cities of its size, Jeddah has been slow to adopt medium-density residential structures. This research evaluates the Jeddah community’s likelihood of accepting row housing, surveying a cross-section of residents seeking housing options other than the apartments currently available. Our questionnaire investigated variables such as gender, age group awareness, house size, architectural functional features, preferable cost, and other considerations. The data and resulting analysis concluded that more than 90% of the respondents would prefer row houses to current options as their primary housing choice.

Financializing urban infrastructure? The speculative state-spaces of ‘public-public partnerships’ in Jakarta

Mega city-regions in the global South facing challenges posed by rapid urbanization have turned to infrastructural solutions, steeped in speculative ‘global-city’ imaginaries and national developmental aspirations, in order to unclog catch-up growth. This infrastructural imperative for growth reflects a broader infrastructure fix, as creditor states and development banks with geopolitical and geoeconomic interests advance competing market-based and state-led models to finance and develop infrastructure. In Jakarta, Indonesia, I examine the coming together of these models as they articulate with the political-economies of city and state, and their path-dependent restructuring following the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. In Jakarta's speculative state-space political interests and developmental objectives of state and city governments are entangled with the capital accumulation strategies of State-Owned Enterprises. With a number of rail transit projects in the city-region driving a boom in Transit-Oriented Development, State-Owned Enterprises speculate on market conditions and the ‘world-class city’ dreams of middle-class residents to leverage their property assets. This financial speculation is equally premised on political speculation around the planning and execution of infrastructure projects, framed by the developmental politics of affordability and accessibility to the city. I examine how these strategies, practices and tensions come together to produce innovative governance arrangements in the provision and management of transport and housing through Public-Public Partnerships.

The Impact of Residential Gated Compounds on Quality of Life in Egypt

Over the last twenty years, gated communities have been growing rapidly in Egypt to present a better living standard to their residents. Accordingly, a lot of Egyptians moved to gated communities to improve their Quality of Life through upgrading their human need satisfaction level. The rapid development of gated residential communities combined with some problems, and gated communities are not preferable to some residents because they are far away from downtown and from most famous neighborhoods in Egypt. Research showed that living in the suburbs has direct and indirect effects on human psychological behavior. It affects people's leisure in addition to the clear classification that has been introduced among the Egyptians according to their address. Nevertheless, gated communities could participate in enhancing residents' security, understanding, spirituality and other human needs. This paper aims at investigating the impact of living in gated communities on middle class residents' Quality of Life by illustrating positive and negative impacts on both residents and non-residents of gated communities in a comparative method. This is achieved through a qualitative methodology that clarifies how Quality of Life for gated community residents has been improved.

IRANIAN YOUTH’S IDENTITY POLITICS: COSMOPOLITAN ASPIRATIONS, SELF-REPROACH AND LIVED EXPERIENCES OF BELONGINGNESS TO THE NATION

Constituting more than one-third of the country’s population, young generation in Iran are also a subnational group who have their own unique experiences of living in Iran and distinct way of defining themselves as Iranian. This has given rise to Iranian youth’s identity politics, evinced by nationwide student-led uprisings and social movements throughout the past decade. Identity politics in this sense is specified as the ways in which the young Iranians reflect on their everyday experiences in order to make sense of their belongingness to the nation. The aim of this study, however, is to elucidate the ambiguities surrounding the youth’s identities through conducting a series of focus group discussions with the most mature segment of this age group who were selected from middle-class residents of Tehran. The findings ultimately unravelled cosmopolitan aspirations, self-reproach and some other identity-making aspects of these young people’s lives.

Between Tolerance and Exclusionism: Urban Iranian Youth’s Attitudes towards Race and Religion

Although the resurgence of race and religiosity among Iranians predates the past millennium, it was not until beginning of twentieth century that both religion and race entered the public discourse, gradually becoming the key constituents of Iranian identity. The emergence of the non-conformist young generation in early 1990s, however, raises important questions about the critical role of race and religion in shaping Iranian youth’s identities. With a specific attention to the most mature (25-29 years old) segment of the middle-class residents of Tehran, and through conducting a series of focus groups, this study explores how these individuals imagine their selves vis-à-vis the others in relation to race and religion. The findings ultimately point to the participants’ oscillation between tolerance and exclusionism towards other races and religions as a way to disentangle the complexities of their identities.

Unpacking the Addis Ababan Exceptionalism—Living and Making Sense of Violent Protests in Ethiopia’s Capital

Violent protests and ethno-communal violence in Ethiopia have been on the rise since 2015. Whilst the country’s capital has mostly been spared, protests have occurred in areas surrounding the capital, its suburbs and, to a lesser extent, even in its city centre. This article aims to answer how Addis Ababa residents make sense of and (dis)engage from/in violent protests and ethno-communal violence where they occur. The article explores the perceptions and experiences of established middle-class residents in the capital, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between June 2020 and May 2021. The article finds that, due to the city’s multi-ethnic character and the residents’ strong metropolitan identity, ethnic identity has not constituted a powerful tool for political mobilisation of residents within the capital. Claims based on ethnicity made by non-residents towards the capital’s resources have largely been rejected by Addis Ababans. Instead, residents have collectively defended their right to the city. The federal state’s readiness to intervene in protests in the capital has further discouraged and countered public protests and communal conflicts. The article reveals that, whilst ‘exceptional’ at the first glance, the peaceful normality of Addis Ababa has relied on ignoring conflicts within Ethiopia’s ethnic-based political settlement and has hidden ordinary, everyday forms of structural violence and conflict.