Beyond binaries in the urban politics of the senses: Ambivalent sensory encounters in French medium-sized shrinking cities

Abstract

This article contributes to scholarly analyses of urban sensory politics, which emphasise the ‘othering’ strategies of middle-class residents targeting the sensory practices and embodied presence of marginalised urban residents. It introduces greater nuance to three structuring binaries that are readily apparent in current scholarly understandings of urban sensory politics: disrupted/disruptive; familiar/unfamiliar; and oppressive/emancipatory. The article focuses on the sensory politics at work in contexts of urban shrinkage. Shrinking cities are characterised by specific processes of economic, spatial and social change, where affordable housing continues to attract new residents, including a growing proportion of socially and economically marginalised people, even as demographic decline eats away at the urban core. The proximity of people of varied socioeconomic statuses with different lifestyles gives rise to sensory encounters marked by difference, and at times tension. I ask, how can we understand the complex and ambivalent sensory experiences of urban change in medium-sized shrinking cities? Drawing on ethnographic material collected in two French shrinking cities, Dieppe and Nevers, and focusing on more vulnerable residents attracted by affordable housing, I analyse a series of ambivalent sensory encounters, marked by intricate, plural, sometimes contradictory feelings and meanings.