Abstract
A wide range of research has demonstrated the enduring significance of social class in Norway, revealing how social stratification unfold through the intersections of wealth and lifestyle differences. Class (dis)advantages, social closure and symbolic boundaries have also been connected to geographical factors in understanding the spatialities of class; how these processes of stratification shape uneven social geographies, which can, in turn, affect people’s life chances. Despite the value of this work, the recent ‘spatial turn’ in Norwegian class analysis has mostly involved quantitative methods or treated geography as something rather static and fixed. By confronting the lack of qualitative research of how the social and spatial are interrelated in the formation of class identities and places through situated practices and experiences, this thesis is empirically grounded in a former working-class neighbourhood that has gradually reterritorialised into a middle-class enclave in the inner eastern part of Oslo. Based on walking interviews and analysing the place-specific notions some of the residents in the neighbourhood of Kampen have of their immediate socio-spatial environment and Oslo as a class-divided city, this study explores how class dispositions (e.g., aesthetic tastes, lifestyles, values) are bound up with creating a territorial sense of place and belonging in the urban fabric. These cultural middle-class urbanites are socio-spatially distinguishing themselves both from what they perceive as the ‘boring’, ‘conformist’ and ‘homogenous’ West End, dominated by their economic upper-/middle-class counterparts, and other inner-city neighbourhoods regarded as too ordinary or commercialised. Expressing a form of (s)elective belonging, the residents are valuing Kampen for its ‘authentic urban village atmosphere’, which they relate to its social, material and historical qualities, and the East End for its ethnic and cultural diversity. This study thereby discusses the socio-spatial practices of these middle-class dwellers of ‘having their cake and eat it too’; living in and sustaining Kampen as a quiet and safe neighbourhood with people predominantly like themselves whilst retaining the urban qualities associated with the cosmopolitan city. Moreover, through formal and informal practices of maintaining the historically ‘authentic’ and neighbourly village atmosphere, the inhabitants are undoubtedly able to nurture a good place to live together. Although this engender a certain degree of social cohesion amongst both in-movers and old-timers and as such nuance the typical binary between gentrifier and gentrified, some of these atmospheric practices depends on a particular sense of place, implicating certain aesthetic tastes, modes of consumption and lifestyles, which may contribute to advance the middle-class reterritorialisation of Kampen. Especially a recent locally initiated project of making the ‘village square’ car-free and reducing parking spaces is interpreted as a particular form of ‘bottom-up’ (green) gentrification.