Light, connectivity and place: young people living in a post-industrial town

Abstract

This article reports on a study of how young people in a post-industrial UK town reflect on their sense of health, place, and identity. Drawing on fifty-six qualitative interviews with 14-15 year olds, we explore how young people negotiate public space and how public lighting and darkness affect interactions with their surroundings. The young people provide an insight into how dark places ignite strong feelings of anxiety and danger, deeply fuelled by the environment itself together with rumours, lived knowledge of the locale, and symbolic boundaries shaping identities of belonging and exclusion in a context of structural inequality.Young people's understandings of place are configured and energised by multiple sources, such as personal experiences and social locations, material landscapes, and powerful discourses -historical and contemporary -conveyed via stories, cautionary tales, and stigmatising media representations. We describe how the young people organised a public campaign to, among other things, install streetlights in a dark location. Their activism demonstrates how street-lighting, or its absence, is both emblematic of the importance of connectivity and place in their lives, and a manifestation of material (political) abandonment and (class) devaluation.

‘It is surprising how much nonsense you hear’: How residents experience and react to living in a stigmatised place. A narrative synthesis of the qualitative evidence

“…They jump people, someone was stabbed there or something. I was like, nope, not going there' (Thomas et al, 2018) (Arthurson, 2013;Browne-Yung et al, 2016;Garthwaite and Bambra, 2018;Jensen and Christensen, 2012;Osborne et al, 2011;Palmer et al, 2004;Pereira and Queirós, 2014;Purdy, 2003;Rhodes, 2012;Thomas et al, 2018;Thomas, 2016).…”

“…Desire to actively fight against defamatory representations or persuade outsiders to change their views A report on the initiative quoted a local resident as saying she had organised the meeting:'because I was irate at having Matchville always being called a bad place to live and to tell bureaucrats that we did have community spirit' (Palmer et al, 2004) (Arthurson et al, 2014;August, 2014;Contreras, 2017;Jensen and Christensen, 2012;Mccormick et al, 2012;Palmer et al, 2004;Purdy, 2003;Thomas et al, 2018)…”

The elephant in the room? Why spatial stigma does not receive the public health attention it deserves

“…47 In a project involving a public campaign by young people to install lights in an unlit area, the authors of the study argued the campaign was an interconnected response to the community' sense of abandonment that had resulted in the area's degradation (including the poor lighting) and was a means of challenging stigmatising external narratives. 48 Not unlike this example, the Communities in Control study, an independent evaluation of the Lottery funded Big Local place-based initiative, identified several instances of resident-led partnerships across England prioritising the issue of 'reputation', 'image' or 'stigma' in their neighbourhood plans; and delivering projects such as public art instillations and community festivals, as well as publicity work to promote more positive portrayals in the media. 49 Examples can also be found in other place-based funding programmes, where resident knowledge is more centrally placed within local efforts to tackle health inequalities.…”

A ‘strategy of resistance’? How can a place-based empowerment programme influence local media portrayals of neighbourhoods and what are the implications for tackling health inequalities?

“…Central to this success, the authors suggest, was an investment in media capacity building for residents, and the presence of community activists engaged in the estate's regeneration developments (Devereux et al, 2011). Participatory action research approaches, while not directly targeting media coverage, have also sought to give voice to residents' narratives of their neighbourhoods as a means of countering negative external discourses in the public domain (Byrne et al, 2016;Cuny, 2018;Thomas et al, 2018).…”