‘I feel more at home here than in my own community’: Approaching the emotional geographies of neighbourhood policy

Abstract

This article explores the dynamics of UK neighbourhood policy in a new way, by bringing together an attention to emotions and identities in social policy governance with approaches to the experiential dynamics of place from social and cultural geography. The article draws on two sets of fieldwork among residents and professional workers in ‘disadvantaged’ neighbourhoods in the UK. These neighbourhoods frame contradictory emotional dynamics for both citizens and workers, in particular around geographies of ‘deprivation’ and ‘community’, producing multiple experiences of closeness and distanciation, inclusion and exclusion, visibility and invisibility. The article shows how the processes and outcomes of neighbourhood policy interventions are unavoidably bound up with these complex emotional geographies of place, especially those that seek to engage residents in change, and that this makes such policy interventions fragile and time-consuming.