Your ghetto, my comfort zone: a life-story analysis of inter-generational housing outcomes and residential geographies in urban south-east England

Abstract

Based on fieldwork carried out in an urban neighbourhood in south-east England, and using a life-story methodology with a focus on intergenerational change over time, I will analyse the housing outcomes of three ethnic categories – the White British majority population, the British-Italian minority and the British-Pakistani minority. Both minority populations are characterised by early moves into owner-occupancy. But where British-Italians typically have moved ‘up and out’, there has been a British-Pakistani residential consolidation in a ‘comfort zone’ where overlaying spheres of community and neighbourhood, underpinned by localised practices of cultural consumption, eventually have come to constitute a spatial and social habitus. Though policy discourse often perceives such practices as indicative of self-segregation, I will here argue that there are similarities between the British-Pakistani comfort zone and the memories of a neighbourhood-based white working-class community, articulated by White British residents.

Keywords:

• housing outcomes
• diversity
• life stories
• segregation
• neighbourhood
• south-east England

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Ben Gidley, Mette Berg and Nando Sigona from COMPAS and to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, and to Mikal Mast for proof-reading the final product. Research for this project was funded under the ESRC small grants programme (RES-000-22-2796).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ole Jensen

OLE JENSEN is research officer at ESRC Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford.