Building belonging: Affecting feelings of home through community building interventions

This PhD-thesis deals with three case-studies that are all examples of state-supported community building interventions in urban settings. Each chapter looks into one case-study, thereby exploring in-depth the ways in which attempts of professional community builders to build local communities affect the feelings of home and belonging of the residents involved. The case-studies focus respectively on interventions that target vulnerable residents with mental disabilities and psychiatric issues, white working class inhabitants, and young urban families. Despite the different era’s and policy frameworks within which the interventions took place, this study shows that there are some general mechanisms at play in state-supported attempts to build local communities amongst specific categories of residents. The main argument of the book is that the underlying assumptions, goals and strategies of the professional community builders and policy makers involved, shape ways in which certain residential populations are enabled to feel ‘naturally’ at home in their neighborhood, while others are impeded to do so, based on the parameters of the community building intervention. Either through social or material interventions in urban settings, categories of belonging and non-belonging are established and (re)produced, thereby reinforcing existing institutional structures of inclusion and exclusion. This study discusses the mechanisms at play in such interventions and points out the importance of familiarity among residents – based on a shared dominant or subdominant social position in the given setting – when it comes to the enhancement or decline of local feelings of home