The challenge of researching “partial exit” and “rootedness” among upper-middle classes in European cities

ABSTRACT

The rise of mobilities has paved the way for important changes within cities and the possibility for urban upper-middle classes to exit from their cities and national societies, disinvesting on them, while still taking profits in a process of deterritorialization with important consequences at the collective level. Investigating the extent to which upper-middle classes shaped and are still rooted (or not) in their cities is a challenge, even more when international comparison is involved. In this paper we focus on two methodological aspects: 1) the different social meaning that upper-middle classes and the social groups composing them can have considering three Western European countries and four cities: Paris, Lyon, Milan and Madrid. 2) How we generated our data through personal interviews with European managers, and the conceptual framework that informed the understanding of rootedness, exit or partial exit of our managers.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobility
• globalization
• cities
• rootedness
• elite

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. It is worth reminding that despite all claims about increasing mobility, Europeans who decide to move their residence abroad are less than 3% each year.

2. In this contribution we do not consider the transnational dimension of this phenomenon, which has been treated elsewhere (Andreotti, Le Galès, and Moreno-Fuentes, 2012 and Andreotti et al., 2014).

3. The selection of neighbourhoods in Paris was based on the remarkably precise analysis and classification carried out by Preteceille (2006) on the social composition of the small statistical units comprising neighbourhoods in the city. In the Milan case, the selection was based on the ecological analysis of Pratschke (2007).