Making the middle classes on shifting ground? Residential status, performativity and middle-class subjectivities in contemporary London

an article by Michaela Benson and Emma Jackson (Goldsmith's College, University of London, UK) published in The British Journal of Sociology Volume 68 Issue 2 (June 2017)

Abstract

This paper argues that shifts in access to housing – both in relation to rental and ownership – disrupt middle-class reproduction in ways that fundamentally influence class formation. While property ownership has had a long association with middle-class identities, status and distinction, an increasingly competitive rental market alongside inflated property prices has impacted on expectations and anxieties over housing futures.

In this paper, we consider two key questions:

1. What happens to middle-class identities under the conditions of this wider structural change?
2. How do the middle classes variously manoeuvre within this?

Drawing on empirical research conducted in London, we demonstrate that becoming an owner-occupier may be fractured along lines of class but also along the axes of age, wealth and timing, particularly as this relates to the housing market. It builds on understandings of residential status and place as central to the formation of class, orienting this around the recognition of both people and place as mutable, emphasizing that changing economic and social processes generate new class positionalities and strategies for class reproduction.

We argue that these processes are writ large in practices of belonging and claims to place, with wider repercussions within the urban landscape.

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