Making a popular neighborhood: on the practices of “pleasure in changing the rules of oppressive space”

Abstract

Based on materials produced by my own urban ethnographies and those of other authors, in this chapter I intend to answer the questions: What is a neighborhood? What are the singularities of a popular neighborhood? What is popular about so-called popular neighborhoods? In these pages, I'll say that neighborhoods are spatial units of relationships between inhabitants who produce a specific space based on social and spatial practices that derive from what is meant by being a neighbor and from the needs and values derived from the position of their inhabitants in the social system. In the case of working class neighborhoods, I point out four socio-spatial practices that make up this type of neighborhood: multipurpose practices, appropriation, self-construction and negotiation, products of the logic of tactical use and the importance of use value. They are, at the same time, cause and effect of the tangle of relationships (network) that take place in this space. These four practices or “ways of doing things” - situational, ambiguous, cunning - are part of what Michel de Certeau (2009, p. 74) called the “art of coups, of moves, of the pleasure in changing the rules of the oppressive space”.