ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the affective and material disinvestments in place, shifting across time, intersecting class, gender and generation. Affective geographies, circulating via official discourses of place, as well as in and through inhabitants senses in evoking place, do not just exist out there in the authentic resident addressed by local agencies rather these forms of residency and articulation are appropriated, marketed and circulated, re-materialising who can and cannot 'fit into place'. Ideas of who and what was the same shifts across time, in relation to 'incomers' and 'outsiders', and shifting discourses of regionalism and cosmopolitanism. Alignment with regional re-framings can propel spaces and subjects forward, framed as becoming, rather than backwardness. This can be contrasted against a sense of being 'stuck' in past-places often characterised negatively as residue. Imaginings and idealisations of the urban-rural North East are applied to both the landscape and character, as an expressive geography which manifests through comparison and contrast, sameness and difference.
