Drawing on multisited ethnographic fieldwork in two historic, attractive, and socially mixed neighborhoods, Kumpula in Helsinki and Malasaña in Madrid, this paper examines what makes people feel at home (or not) in their neighborhood. Marrying the literatures on social belonging and materiality, we analyze the interactions through which local places, people, and materials become familiar and personal. We identify the house in Kumpula and the plaza in Madrid as “everyday totems” that weave local life and community together. In both neighborhoods, the testimonies of home are accompanied with an attachment to the local totem and related lifestyle, but the house and the plaza generate different everyday politics of belonging. House‐based belonging in Kumpula requires resources and long‐term engagement that over time contributes to a personal, but rather exclusive web of belonging. Plaza‐based belonging in Malasaña is more inclusive and elastic, but joining the web of belonging requires time and sociability.

This article continues the conceptual work of developing a process-oriented perspective on belonging by taking up the active engagement of affiliation (and disaffiliation) as an undertheorised yet necessary aspect of accomplishing belonging. In developing the concept we draw on Marx’s notion of work as material activity in forms of life and the sociological concepts of face-work and emotion work. We conceptualise belonging work as relational work concerned with shaping situational interactions; webs of relationships; social boundaries; and materials and rhythms as dimensions of belonging. This work is conditioned by social categorisations and patterns of inclusion and exclusion through which it takes place in relation to specific forms of life. The concept of belonging work offers a theoretically integrative and sensitising concept that highlights the relational dynamics of belonging, providing insight and inspiration to social researchers inquiring into the work of belonging and its associated social consequences throughout the research process.

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