Co-existing structures of feeling: Senses and imaginaries of industrial neighbourhoods

Abstract

This article explores how structures of feeling shape everyday life and local atmospheres in two industrial neighbourhoods located in the cities of Moscow and Yekaterinburg. Developing Raymond Williams’s concept of structure of feeling, I conceptualise it as an affective principle regulating sensual experiences, spatial imaginaries and practical activities of local communities within socio-material infrastructures. I argue that Soviet (socialist/industrial/residual) and post-Soviet (neoliberal/post-industrial/emergent) structures of feeling co-exist in senses, imaginaries and the landscapes of Russia’s deindustrialising urban areas. Working-class and long-standing middle-class residents show an affective attachment to place and tend to imagine their neighbourhoods with the help of an industrial structure of feeling comprising values of factory culture, communality and shared space, while an emergent structure of feeling is informed by values of neoliberal development, individual comfort and private space. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography in two locations, this article provides an empirically grounded theorisation of the concept of structure of feeling by bringing it in sociology of space and place and urban anthropology. It contributes to the debate about place attachment of deindustrialising communities and their vision of the past, present and future of their neighbourhoods by an extended understanding of structure of feeling not as a spirit of the time but as a multiple spirit of the time and place.