ABSTRACT
The tales of the virtues of the old working-class neighbourhood remind us of the social conditions for the symbolic performativity of the residents. The residents’ strategies of coping with the stigmatised territory provide an insight into the struggles related to physical place and social position. Chapter 11 focuses on the symbolic struggles defining daily life in the lower half of the polarising city and presents three longer interview-portraits that testify to such battles of belonging. They are examples of the subjective experience of place and the ways in which individuals are enwrapped in the intricate relations between physical, symbolic, and social structures that make up the North West as a location and position in the Danish Metropolis. They are embodiments of the structure and history of that place, and as such, they provide a sense of who the people of the North West are, of what constitute their worries and views of their place in the geographical, social, and symbolic hierarchies, of their struggles for claiming a position in the social world, a justification for existing.
