This article explores how people experience and respond to a post-industrial labour market context through residential (im)mobility. Focusing on places that are represented through a range of official measures as ‘declining’, the research explains why people may remain in weaker labour market areas, rather than moving to places that could offer greater employment opportunities. The case study approach focused on two urban neighbourhoods in England, Nearthorpe (Sheffield) and Eastland (Grimsby). The article draws on repeated, in-depth, biographical interviews with 25 individuals across 18 households. The research shows that stability of residence was a necessary counterbalance to a low-paid and insecure work context. Immobility facilitated access to a range of informal support networks. However, immobility was not simply a by-product of lack of mobility or a passive state. This research conceptualises immobility as an active process in which participants engaged in different forms of adaptation and resistance in the face of changing labour market conditions.
This article reviews the literature on changing housing aspirations and expectations in contemporary housing systems. It argues that there is a conceptual and definitional gap in relation to the term 'housing aspirations', as distinct from expectations, preferences, choices and needs. The article sets out working definitions of these terms, before discussing the evidence on changing housing (and related) systems. Emerging research has begun to consider whether trends such as declining homeownership, affordability concerns and precarious labour systems across a range of countries are fundamentally changing individuals' aspirations for the forms of housing they aim to access at different stages of their lives. Whilst much of the research into housing aspirations has been considered in terms of tenure, and homeownership in particular, this article suggests that research needs to move beyond tenure and choice frameworks, to consider the range of dimensions that shape aspirations, from the political economy and the State to socialization and individuals' dispositions for housing. ARTICLE HISTORY
The amount of living space we have access to is one manifestation of the unequal distribution of housing resources within societies. The COVID-19 pandemic has required most households to spend more time at home, unmasking inequalities and reigniting longstanding debates about the functionality and experience of smaller homes. Drawing on interviews across three UK cities, this article attends to the changing household routines of individuals living in different types of small home, exploring daily life before and during ‘lockdown’. Using the concept of urban rhythms, the data show that the lockdown has intensified existing pressures of living in a smaller home – lack of space for different functions and household members – whilst constraining coping strategies, like spending time outside the home. Lockdown restrictions governing mobility and contact acted as a mechanism of exception, disrupting habitual patterns of life and sociability, and forcing people to spend more time in smaller homes that struggled to accommodate different functions, affecting home atmospheres. For some, the loss of normal strategies was so significant that they sought to challenge the new rules governing daily life to protect their wellbeing.
This article draws on repeated, biographical interviews with 18 households to explore how people construct a sense of belonging in two post-industrial neighbourhoods in the ‘ordinary’ urban areas of Grimsby and Sheffield, UK. It argues that experiences of low-paid, precarious work undermine the historic role that employment has played in identity construction for many individuals, and that places perform a crucial function in anchoring people’s lives and identities. Three active processes in the generation of belonging are elaborated. Through identification, dis-identification and the micro-differentiation of space, people constructed places in order to belong with others ‘like them’. Residents also internalised the symbolic logics of places through their daily movement, territorialising space as they learned how to be in particular environments. Finally, places were temporally situated within relational biographies and experienced in relation to past and imagined futures. Places fulfilled an important psycho-social function, anchoring people’s identities and generating a sense that they belonged.
Shared reading with young children has a positive impact on a range of areas including language development and literacy skill, yet some parents face challenges in engaging in this activity. While much is known about the benefits of shared reading, the barriers to the activity are poorly understood. The research presented here draws on in-depth interviews with 20 parents of preschool children to understand home reading practices in a socioeconomically and culturally mixed sample, exploring the motivations and barriers that exist to engaging in shared reading. Results indicate that parents are motivated to engage in shared reading when there is clear evidence of their child's enjoyment. However, parental perceptions of 'negative' child-feedback could be a barrier to shared reading. This has particular implications for the age at which parents perceive reading to be a valued and worthwhile activity for their child, suggesting that some parents may choose not read with their babies because they are not receiving the feedback they require in order to sustain the activity. Moreover, this study also revealed that for many parents, parental enjoyment of shared reading activity was closely related to evidence of childenjoyment, thus creating a further barrier to reading when child-enjoyment was perceived to be absent. This has strong implications for interventions that seek to encourage and support home reading practices between parents and young children.
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