Padding the bunker: Strategies of middle-class disaffiliation and colonisation in the city

R  Atkinson

doi:10.1080/0042980600597806

Padding the bunker: Strategies of middle-class disaffiliation and colonisation in the city

R Atkinson

Sociology

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

Residential segregation has often been seen as a significant and intractable urban problem. Empirical analyses have focused on the clustering and social impacts of concentrated deprivation and ethnicity, while explanations of segregation have generally looked at the role of income, housing markets, and wider social and institutional discrimination. This paper attempts to build on such preoccupations by considering current urban transformations to theorise the recent middle-class colonisation of cities in the UK. Segregation is seen here not just as the concentration of an urban poor or particular ethnic groups, but also as representing an extended spatial bifurcation between the choices of the affluent to withdraw into increasingly insulated enclaves, while places of poverty contain populations away from this increasingly fearful, yet tendentiously urbanising, middle class. Using a series of case studies, a typology is developed of increasing disaffiliation as a prelude to a further debate on the feasibility of encouraging social diversity in the city.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	819-832
Number of pages	14
Journal	Urban Studies
Volume	43
Issue number	4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/0042980600597806
Publication status	Published - Apr 2006

Keywords

TIME-SPACE TRAJECTORIES
GATED COMMUNITIES
GENTRIFICATION
SEGREGATION
FEAR

Access to Document

10.1080/0042980600597806

Cite this

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title = "Padding the bunker: Strategies of middle-class disaffiliation and colonisation in the city",

abstract = "Residential segregation has often been seen as a significant and intractable urban problem. Empirical analyses have focused on the clustering and social impacts of concentrated deprivation and ethnicity, while explanations of segregation have generally looked at the role of income, housing markets, and wider social and institutional discrimination. This paper attempts to build on such preoccupations by considering current urban transformations to theorise the recent middle-class colonisation of cities in the UK. Segregation is seen here not just as the concentration of an urban poor or particular ethnic groups, but also as representing an extended spatial bifurcation between the choices of the affluent to withdraw into increasingly insulated enclaves, while places of poverty contain populations away from this increasingly fearful, yet tendentiously urbanising, middle class. Using a series of case studies, a typology is developed of increasing disaffiliation as a prelude to a further debate on the feasibility of encouraging social diversity in the city.",

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