HSA Special Issue: Housing in “Hard Times”: Marginality, Inequality and Class

This paper reasserts the relationship between class and housing through a sociological exploration of working-class place attachment, against the backdrop of a recession and government “disinvestment” in social housing. These are hard times for housing and harder still if you are working class. Interest in working-class lives within sociological research has declined; meanwhile, place attachment is deemed a middle-class proclivity of “elective belonging”: a source of place-based identity in response to ontological insecurity. I draw from an ethnographic exploration of Partick, Glasgow to demonstrate how workingclass residents express strong “elective belonging” in financially and ontologically insecure times yet, paradoxically, their ability to stay physically “fixed” to place is weakened. I argue that working-class place attachment is broadly characterized by strong “elective belonging” and poor “elective fixity”: choice and control over one’s ability to stay fixed within their neighbourhood.