Creating the Unequal City by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Sociology, Urban
ISBN: 9781317158431
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

Segregation does not simply mean that the poor and immigrants stay among their own. The specific housing strategies of middle class residents heavily contribute to segregation. This does not mean that the middle classes actively choose to turn away from the poor and the immigrants. We have seen that in two areas of Berlin, Lichterfelde and Kreuzberg, notwithstanding their different location in the city, residents lived in homogeneous settings with no durable engagements of few fluid encounters with other social groups. This homogeneity constituted a resource for these families characterized by their moral orientations on the dominant cultural script of mothering, where women did most of the nurturing. Especially for mothers the neighbourhood as a resource was crucial to combine their duties of motherhood with their images of themselves as modern women, with healthy lifestyles, leisure time for themselves and, sometimes, professional careers. Many of those who did not work turned to their children as projects that served their self-realization and focused on the reproduction of their own social status through intensive parenting.

The neighbourhood played an important role on various levels. Practical support through supervision of children and material exchanges, and emotional support of shared values and norms of child rearing contributed to the creation of a place where women could combine good parenting and a modern woman’s lifestyle. Hence, the possibility to escape the island made this ‘refuge that is more extensive and embracing than the home alone could ever be’ (Atkinson 2006, 822) attractive to women preferring an urban environment over the ennui of traditional suburbia. Nonetheless, the neighbourhood as a resource also facilitated the continuation of the ‘gender fate’ and patriarchy. Moreover, the focus on one’s own children’s needs and the needs of the family produced an inward orientation on the neighbourhood, with exclusion as a result. The absence of a strong awareness of the rest of the city, the localness of the use of urban facilities, and the limited geographical scope of social networks of the mothers all contributed to the neighbourhood as a village or island. Effectively, this meant that these mothers avoided routes through the city – also shown in their preference for cars over public transport – for fluid encounters, let alone more durable engagements, with residents unlike themselves. Their energy was so focused on the family and their neighbourhood that to make their social capital accessible to others unlike themselves was not happening. It did not occur to them as something they might do, and the everyday contexts in which such transfers of capital would become the automatic consequence of everyday practices and fluid encounters simply did not happen. Segregation, then, was actively enhanced and reified by the residential choices and everyday practices of these mothers. Different from authors like Atkinson (cf. 2006), Butler (cf. 2003), Slater (cf. 2013) or Smith (cf. 1996), we hence do not see a decision on the part of the middle classes to organize their lives in such a way that contacts with people unlike themselves were avoided.

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