Everyone knew everyone: diversity, community memory and a new established–outsider figuration

Abstract

This article explores the transformation of a community and its diversity as narrated by former industrial workers from a neighbourhood in Nuremberg, in a context in which company-based social housing of workers had been replaced by private rented accommodation accessed by middle class residents of migrant backgrounds. In biographical interviews, narratives emerge in which diversity and social difference are not seen as ethnic difference, but rather as a power difference within an established–outsider figuration. In this figuration, heterogeneous past and present cultural practices are homogenised through community control and regulation along normative rules as defined by the established. Workers’ nostalgic laments for the loss of their former status show that figuration of established and outsiders is dynamic, opening up new ways of thinking about diverse place-making and alternative perspectives on urban gentrification.

Keywords:

• community
• diversity
• established–outsider figuration
• memories
• nostalgia
• power

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Ben Gidley and Mette Berg for generous editorial and intellectual support on earlier drafts. I wish to thank Claire Alexander and the anonymous referees for their valuable comments.

Notes

1. 1. To secure the interviewees’ anonymity all names are pseudonyms.

2. 2. Photographs illustrating this article are available as supplementary material and can be viewed here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/suppl/10.1080/1070289X.2013.822377.

3. 3. This article is based on data gained in the SPHERE project (2008–2011) that was established through the 7th framework programme of the EU (SSH 8–5.2.01.). It took place in six transformed industrial landscapes (in Spain, Turkey, France, UK, Poland and Germany). For the German case in the South of Nuremberg, 25 narrative life history interviews with people of different age, occupation, origin and gender have been recorded. In addition, ten experts and three focus groups have been interviewed. The collection of data, the selection of cases and the analysis follows the principles of Grounded Theory (Strauss and Corbin 1994). The narrative life history interviews were structured in three phases. The stimulus for the narration was a simple request for telling the life story from the beginning. The interviewees started with a self-structured narration that was not interrupted by me. This was to secure openness and to allow them to structure and develop their life stories on their own. In the second stage, some topics that were addressed during the interviewee’s narration were referred to again, while in the final phase, I addressed topics not mentioned previously (Schütze 1983, Rosenthal 2004).

4. 4. The capability of the established outsider concept is demonstrated also in recent research (May 2004, Hogenstijn et al. 2008, Loyal 2011, O’Connor and Goodwin 2012).

5. 5. The garden city concept was initiated by Ebenezer Howard in 1898. Beginning with the first garden city Letchworth in North London, garden cities were erected near other industrial regions worldwide, like in the USA (Crawford 1995), the UK (Hardy 2000), Australia (Freestone 1989) and in Germany (Wolff 2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lars Meier

LARS MEIER is a lecturer in the Institute for Sociology at Technical University, Berlin.