ABSTRACT
In some ways our book has come full circle. We started in a Southwark housing estate and ended in a Mexican housing project, with two chapters chronicling the labelling of places that are ‘home’ to some, and hideous to others (and for some, both at the same time). In both of those chapters, and other chapters throughout the book, the authors unpick the emotions bound up in the discursive and physical production of both ‘home’ and ‘other’, and within this, the emotional resonance of local and transnational visions of past and future. The journey we have taken criss-crosses migratory routes, belongings and dislocations, all the while attempting to marry the perspectives of ‘above’ and ‘below’, ‘near’ and ‘far’ outlined by Back and Keith in their opening reflections. Following this journey reveals some recurring motifs: first, the emotional resonance of how places become stigmatised – and the emotional labour that can go into dealing with that stigmatisation or reclaiming positive associations. Second, the ways that movement between places and change within places are intertwined so that nostalgia, loss and longing are about lost moments in time, as much as places on a map. Third, occasions when the very multiplicity and difference within urban spaces become a mode of belonging in which to be ‘different’ is to have something in common. And finally, the ‘creeping familiarity’ in which movement, change and transruptions (Hesse 2000) begin to be recognised as part of everyday life, perhaps offering the possibilities for a more open, unfinished and growing cosmopolitan imagination.
