Place melancholy as a lost sense of belonging during urban transformation among older women long-term residents of HaTikva neighborhood in Tel Aviv-Jaffa

Abstract

Based on an anthropological analysis informed by emotional and social geography literature and by the theory of melancholia, this article proposes an original perspective on the question of long-term residents’ place attachment, tracing the effect of urban change on their emotional identification with their neighborhood. The concept of ‘place melancholy’ is suggested to describe the collective sense of sadness aroused when a place changes rapidly, leading long-term residents to lose their sense of belonging. It evokes melancholia by highlighting their marginalized social position as well as their personal family and health status. HaTikva neighborhood in south Tel Aviv-Jaffa provides the case study. Originally inhabited predominantly by lower-income Mizrahim, or Jews from Islamic countries, in recent years it has undergone a dramatic transformation with the influx of African asylum seekers and the veteran community’s contraction. Informed by ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that collective melancholia is felt among the HaTikva’s Mizrahi residents, related to their position at the margins of a global city and to their experience of place loss following the migration wave. Whereas the melancholia is shared by these residents across ethnoclass and gender lines, the older Mizrahi women whose narratives were developed in designated narrative focus group and are analyzed here experience an additional layer of melancholia associated with age; nevertheless, it may be alleviated by strong social ties and mutual community support. Such narratives indicate the theoretical importance and relevance of place melancholy when analyzing place belonging during urban change, particular among marginalized older long-term residents.

Keywords:

• Place attachment
• belonging
• place melancholy
• emotion and affect
• old age
• urban transformation
• global migration
• Mizrahim
• Tel Aviv

Acknowledgments

I would like to sincerely thank Amalia Sa’ar for her valuable feedback and encouragement throughout the research and Yael Navaro for her kind support during my fellowship at Cambridge. I would also like to thank the editor of Gender Place and Culture the anonymous reviewers and Sibylle Lustenberger for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Finlay, I would like to thank the long-term residents of the HaTikva neighborhood for their willingness to take part in the research and for everything they taught me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Tel Aviv-Yaffo Research Scholarship for Urban Innovation and Development.

Notes on contributors

Tal Shamur

Tal Shamur is an ISEF Foundation International Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology, at the University of Cambridge. He holds a BA degree (magna cum laude) in sociology and anthropology and human services and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Haifa University. He also holds an MA degree in labor studies from Tel Aviv University. His work focuses on questions of belonging and identification within the urban sphere and was published in journals such as local environment (2021), emotion space and society (2019) and citizenship studies (2018). His Book titled: Hope and Melancholy on an Urban Frontier: Ethnicity, Space and Gender in the HaTikva Neighborhood, Tel-Aviv was published in the University of Haifa press (2020, in Hebrew).