Drawing on evidence from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2014-2016 for the Understanding Everyday Participation (UEP) project, this paper addresses the relationship between space, place and participation in a "suburban village" on the edge of the city of Aberdeen in North East Scotland. Recent critiques have pointed to the ways in which the rural and peri-urban domains have been neglected in cultural policy as the byproduct of a preoccupation with urban regeneration and the "creative city". Working with conceptual frameworks developed by Raymond Williams and Charles Taylor, our research reveals the rich fabric of participation in this community, reflecting an historically rooted "common culture", through which social tensions are mediated by a "village social imaginary". This "residual" formation, which emphasises the importance of everyday culture to the constitution of the civic realm, suggests a much broader understanding of cultural value than is currently recognised in policy, but is currently under threat from generational change and social flux.

The Understanding Everyday Participation (UEP) research project questions "official" versions of what constitutes cultural participation and "proposes a radical re-evaluation of the relationship between participation and cultural value" (www. everydayparticipation.org/about/test-showcase-page/). This article will map out a selective literature review of everyday life with a particular focus on sociological writing, and additional contributions from both scholars of history and philosophy. It will suggest how such work might illuminate both UEP research and cultural policy development. Furthermore, it makes the case for such literature usefully underpinning the project's focus on developing the "research-policy-practice nexus", arguing that a careful analysis of the complexities of everyday life can help to generate more democratic and participatory everyday cultural environments.

This article examines how intensifying inequality in the UK plays out at a local level, in order to bring out the varied ways polarisation takes place ‘on the ground’. It brings a community analysis buttressed by quantitative framing to the study of economic, spatial and relational polarisation in four towns in the UK. We distinguish differing dynamics of ‘elite-based’ polarisation (in Oxford and Tunbridge Wells) and ‘poverty-based’ polarisation (in Margate and Oldham). Yet there are also common features. Across the towns, marginalised communities express a sense of local belonging. But tensions between social groups also remain strong and all towns are marked by a weak or ‘squeezed middle’. We argue that the weakness of intermediary institutions, including but not limited to the ‘missing middle’, and capable of bridging gaps between various social groups, provides a major insight into both the obstacles to, and potential solutions for, re-politicising inequality today.

This paper firstly discusses the origins and importance of 'the weekend' in the 'industrial' cities of Manchester (UK) and Porto (Portugal). Drawing on previous work specifically focused on this subject, it examines the spatio-temporal shifts evident during the industrial revolution, which produced a more 'disciplined' labour process. Work and leisure were, thereafter, constituted as separate domains, the weekend being a designated leisure time and space. We consider the more recent temporal shift, generated through the processes of flexibilisation, which, we argue, renders 'the weekend' as we understand it, under threat. We discuss this through the presentation and analysis of testimony from workers, those working in a supermarket in Salford/Manchester and in shopping centres in Porto. Our conversations, in the form of semi-structured interviews, with workers in these locations led us to questions of 'social time' and whether there is any longer, recognition of 'time for ourselves'.