ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 introduces the study’s more economically secure, largely middle class participants, whose political concerns are similar to the less well-off but relatively removed from material hardship and necessity. This relative affluence will be demonstrated to have a crucial impact on the qualitative character of these participants’ political concerns and attitudes. Their relationships with the city in which they live, and with a sense of place in general, are shaped by utility and more neo-liberal, individualist and privatised notions of mobility, home and belonging than those discussed in the previous chapters. These participants describe lifestyles involving a routine sense of mobility, with many, despite ostensibly holding to progressive political principles, implicitly stigmatising and pathologising, as culturally and politically backward, those who live in more deprived areas of Portsmouth.
