Towards a Geography of Resentment
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Walking on the Rim: Towards a Geography of Resentment Paolo Cardullo Department of Sociology Goldsmiths – University of London Declaration I declare that the work presented in my thesis is my own. Paolo Cardullo 2 Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank my colleagues and friends at CUCR (Goldsmiths) for the lovely and supportive work environment they created there. Without their jokes, moans, lunch breaks and academic discussions this long journey would have been sterile and meaningless. Secondly, my supervisors Caroline Knowles and David Oswell who have done a fantastic job at keeping me focussed and boosting my confidence, even in periods of personal troubles and discomfort. A special note of thanks to Michael Keith, who I first approached with my one page research proposal, and to Ben Gidley and Jennie Munday for their comments on my chapters. I would also like to recognise the British born proofreaders that, voluntarily, have helped me to tackle the tribulation of writing a PhD thesis in a second language. In particular, to my bright wife Sukhwant Dhaliwal for her critical and timely observations and for keeping up with my ever changing moods. Last, but by no means least, I would like to acknowledge the remote support and affectionate references that my 'prof' and mentor Margherita Russo, from the University of Modena, suggested for my application at the start of this long PhD journey. 3 Abstract My research seeks to understand the complexity of East Greenwich residents' affective reactions at the moment when this landscape was undergoing a dramatic and rapid change. I walked its riverside to the Dome while this was turned from a mostly dismissed and derelict industrial land to a residential area ready to host parts of the Olympic Games. My starting point is that a process of gentrification with symbolic and material displacement of working-class people and their social practices has been occurring. Throughout my fieldwork, I constantly seek to understand the emotional reactions to this pervasive urban change from local residents, workers, and occasional passers-by who I met during the last five years. I have done this with the aid of my always obsolete digital camera and my walking boots, and applying photo elicitation technique whenever it was possible. The unique combination of photographs, walks, and interviews helped me to unpack, from the lower ground perspective of local working-class residents, their affective reactions to this peculiar change. Such an emplaced and class-based struggle opens to what I call the 'geography of resentment'. My hypothesis is that this resentment is a form of reaction against the symbolic violence that gentrification brings. The vehicle through which resentment is expressed is a form of remembering very close to nostalgia, which I decouple from both 'imperial melancholia' and 'hierarchical belonging'. Rather, I contend that this is a form of affective class struggle fought at the level of the symbolic. A debate remains open about the extent to which such controversial form of affection maintains distance from political instrumentalisation and mainstream discourses of communitarian cohesion, while at the same time reflecting the paradoxes of urban change. 4 Table of Contents Walking on the Rim: Towards a Geography of Resentment....................................................1 Declaration....................................................................................................................2 Acknowledgements.................................................................................................................3 Abstract...................................................................................................................................4 Introduction ............................................................................................................................7 Conflicting Histories.....................................................................................................8 Research Questions: in the Field.................................................................................15 Thesis Map..................................................................................................................23 Chapter 1. Literature Review.................................................................................................26 Introduction.................................................................................................................26 Re-placing Dis-placement...........................................................................................28 Class matters...............................................................................................................33 The problem of value..................................................................................................39 Displacement: now you see it, now you don't..............................................................44 Visualising gentrification............................................................................................51 Conclusion..................................................................................................................56 Chapter 2. Methodology........................................................................................................60 Introduction.................................................................................................................60 Writing with images, visualising with text..................................................................61 Why Realism? Why 'Critical'?.....................................................................................64 Why Photography?......................................................................................................70 Doing photo elicitation................................................................................................74 Display and dissemination...........................................................................................78 Why 'Walking on the Rim'?.........................................................................................82 'Combined Practices'...................................................................................................87 Chapter 3. An Ethics of Encounters.......................................................................................92 Introduction.................................................................................................................92 Genesis by encounters.................................................................................................96 Detouring the “tours”................................................................................................115 Chapter 4. Lovell's and Surroundings..................................................................................121 Introduction...............................................................................................................121 Roots.........................................................................................................................123 Riverside ..................................................................................................................129 Home sweet home.....................................................................................................137 5 Some concluding remarks ........................................................................................148 Chapter 5. Towards a 'Geography of Resentment'...............................................................151 Introduction...............................................................................................................151 Remembering place...................................................................................................154 Fairness ....................................................................................................................162 Cutty Sark and 'Traders' ...........................................................................................171 Some concluding remarks.........................................................................................177 Conclusion...........................................................................................................................181 Bibliography........................................................................................................................188 Attached: Cardullo P (2009) Walking on the Rim: a Tale of Abjection. London: Blurb. Cardullo P (2011) Walking on the Rim: Photos, Encounters, Objects. London: Blurb. 6 Introduction My research seeks to understand the material and emotional changes happening to residents' practices, as a consequence of the recent renewal of East Greenwich Riverside. This small neighbourhood of clear working-class character is squeezed in between one of the largest regeneration attempt made in Britain, the Greenwich Peninsula Masterplan (with its focus on the O2 Arena), and the wealthy post-colonial landscape of its town centre, attraction for tourists from all over the world. At the moment of writing my thesis, Greenwich was included in the hosting boroughs of the Olympic Games and was also about to become a Royal Borough during the Diamond Jubilee. These two big events put an increasing pressure on the regeneration of the area and, inevitably, on its residential housing market. I have been walking and photographing