Towards Successful Suburban Town Centres
A study of the relationship between morphology, sociability, economics and accessibility

Please note that this project has finished. The current project is Adaptable Suburbs.

RGS - IBG Conference 2008: The Geography of Suburban Space - SSTC project in association with the Urban Geography Research Group

Paper 3: P. Watt (Birkbeck, University of London) Living in an oasis: middle-class disaffiliation in the London suburbs    paper 4 ››

The English suburbs have traditionally been associated with the white middle class, but there is also evidence of greater social heterogeneity as they accommodate a wider range of class and ethnic groups. At one level this can regarded as a positive development, but it also conceals the various micro- socio-spatial strategies employed by the suburban middle class to maintain their threatened exclusivity. This paper examines these issues with reference to interview and survey research undertaken in a fringe London suburb, 'Eastside' located in Essex - a mixed-class neighbourhood. the paper focuses on middle-class residents of a private estate called 'Woodlands'. Woodlands residents regarded it as an upmarket enclave that was too physically close to lower-class housing and schools. Their socio-spatial practices spilled out beyond Eastside and allowed them to reinforce their sense of social exclusivity by avoiding those 'risky' lower-class proximate people and places. The paper demonstrates how the middle classes are able to use their resources so they are not necessarily tied to the immediate neighbourhood, unlike the working class. Therefore instead of 'elective belonging' (Savage et al, 2005), the middle-class Eastside residents engaged in 'elective non-belonging' or in neighbourhood non-adoption. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the findings for processes of urban segregation in London, as opposed to Manchester the globalising city in relation to which Savage and colleagues devised the theory of elective belonging.

Project contacts: email: l.vaughan@ucl.ac.uk - telephone: +44 (0)20 3108 9042 - general enquiries: contact us

EPSRC reference: EP/D06595X/1