Landscapes of belonging, portraits of life: researching everyday multiculture in an inner city estate

Abstract

Three tower blocks and three low-rise blocks: nearly a hundred languages and over a hundred countries of origin. A council estate in a super-diverse neighbourhood is not only a space of concentrated difference and division, but also an intercultural space where new modes of living together emerge. At the same time, it is connected in an increasing number of ways with various outsides which make its internal space more complex. This article is based on a long-term collaborative research programme that included commissioned local policy research, academic ethnography and an artistic visual collaboration. It argues that multiple research strategies, including radically collaborative modes of inquiry, are required to represent the multiple, incommensurate perspectives co-present in the dense urban space of the estate.

Keywords:

• multiculture
• housing estate
• visual ethnography
• collaborative ethnography
• super-diversity

Acknowledgements

The Portrait Project this article describes was conceived by and conducted with Simon Rowe and Francesca Sanlorenzo, whose photographs illustrate it. The other fieldwork on which this article is based was conducted collaboratively with many colleagues, in particular Michael Keith and Marjorie Mayo. I am grateful to all of them and to Nando Sigona, Mette Louise Berg and Claire Alexander, who helped me think through these issues in moving from the research to the writing. The main funder of the research was Pepys Community Forum. I am grateful to them, and to the residents and workers of Pepys estate, especially Jessica Leech, Malcolm Cadman, Lewis Herlitz and the late Pete Pope, for the time they gave as part of this work.

Notes

1. 1. Photographs illustrating this article are available as supplementary material and can be viewed here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/suppl/10.1080/1070289X.2013.822381. All photographs are by Simon Rowe and Francesca Sanlorenzo, CACAO.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ben Gidley

BEN GIDLEY is a senior researcher at COMPAS at the University of Oxford.