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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 560

Part of Session 165: Language, Place and Identity (Other abstracts in this session)

Socio-Spatial Narrative: a framework to understand urban conflict

Authors: Verloo, Nanke
Submitted by: Verloo, Nanke (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, The)

European cities become increasingly complex as the populations become ever more diverse. Cities are the place where social and policy—mobility, diversity, and integration—are negotiated in everyday interactions. This has made the neighborhood attractive as a realm for policy intervention. From the perspective of residents, however, the neighborhood remains a primarily domain for identification. One common outcome is the contestation of urban policies by residents seeking to claim ownership over their living environment.

In these moments of contestation, underlying tensions bubble over and surface standing grievances and experiences of marginalization. Meaning and identity get renegotiated in these episodes of contestation (Davies and Harré 1990). Thus urban conflicts offer a lens for analyzing modern society in a bounded socio- and spatial environment, the neighborhood.

In this paper, I propose a framework to help unravel the complex relationship between space, language, and action that the experience of neighborhood draws together. I call this framework a socio-spatial narrative of urban conflict. Through an ethnographic description of an urban controversy in The Hague, I illustrate the fine-grained insights that this framework can provide into the language of emotions and into the way language and space mediate the construction of self and other.  

This controversy developed in a new town development. When first-generation residents were forced to close the neighborhood center they had founded and managed to make way for a center organized by a professional welfare organization, they experienced marginalization at the hands of the local authorities.  The residents responded by trying to assert their power and interests and recover a margin of control and respect.  The local authorities could not see their tactics and strategies (De Certeau 1988) as political participation, however, and their responses contributed to a pattern of escalation. Relationships deteriorated as public and semi-public places were contested and parochialized (Lofland 2007).  Groups held different places in the neighborhood hostage at different time. The contestation escalated to episodes of physical violence against professionals and the police.

The tenor of these ongoing ‘negotiations’ changed when a new professional entered the story. His first move was to acknowledge the loss and grief of the early settlers and to strengthen the relationships between the residents and public officials through a process of engagement rooted in local priorities and concerns.  The recognition and engagement of emotions that developed in this new pattern of practice created the room needed to strengthen the relationships among the parties. The case study presents this transitions in this narrative from unacknowledged loss and grief among the members of a marginal and desperate group to restoring their role as organizers of the community in which they live.

Bibliography

Certeau, M, de, (1988) “Practice of everyday life”, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Davies, B. and R. Harré. (1990), “Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves”, Journal for the Theory of SocialBehaviour, vol. 20, iss. 1, pp. 43-63.

Lofland, L. H. (2007) “The public realm. Exploring the city’s quintessential social territory”, London: Aldine Transaction, a division of transaction publishers.