Lost in the ‘churn’? Locating neighbourliness in a transient neighbourhood

Abstract

This article considers the importance of everyday encounters in underpinning sociality, focusing especially on the located and material aspects of social relations. Bringing together debates about social relations, place attachment and population turnover (or ‘churn’), and using research carried out in the UK city of Leicester, in an inner city neighbourhood with high population turnover, the article investigates incidences of neighbourliness, probing what happens to social relations between neighbours in a place which could be considered to be unstable in terms of population, and where conviviality could be deemed to be under threat by wider structural economic forces. Three overlapping questions are addressed: how does neighbourliness manifest itself in such conditions, where is it practiced, and how do people relate to the material environment around them when the social landscape is apparently so unstable? Drawing on in-depth interviews with inner-city Leicester residents this article considers not only the narrated practice of social and neighbourly relations in a particular setting, but also how important place is to this practice.