Valuing the bowling alley: Contestations over the preservation of spaces of everyday urban multiculture in London

Abstract

This article builds on ‘the convivial, everyday turn’ by approaching the workings of complex urban spaces of multiculture as entangled with processes of urban change that are infused with judgements and contestations about what is of value. The article explores the competing value claims made for a leisure space, a London bowling alley, used by a diverse group of people (in terms of dis/ability, ethnicity, gender, class and age) that has been threatened with demolition. It examines how arguments about diversity and inclusivity are deployed in these debates and how official discourses are resisted through the mobilisation of other articulations of social value. The article argues that the combination of the hollowing out of the concept of diversity and the political and economic context results in a paradox whereby multiculturalism is celebrated as an atmosphere and generator of capital while existing physical spaces of everyday urban multiculture are at best unprotected and at worst not recognised, devalued and demolished.

Social infrastructure and the public life of cities: Studying urban sociality and public spaces

“…These issues are also entangled with issues of ownership and provision. Privately provided commercial facilities may well be vulnerable to closure as Jackson () highlights with a bowling alley. However, in economically marginalised neighbourhoods, it is precisely through private provisioning of spaces like dance studios and fitness classes that a practice like Zumba has become a site of public sociality for Latino American women in Los Angeles (Petrzela, ; Scott, ).…”

“…DeLand (2012), Crossley (2004), Wilste (2007), Tonkiss (2013), Hitchings and Latham (2017a), Jackson (2019).…”

Hierarchical Assemblages of Citizenship and Belonging: The Pedestrian Speech Acts of British Gujarati Indian Walkers

“…Spaces of leisure whilst not necessarily politically "neutral", are spaces where acts of resistance, solidarity and friendship, have the potential to foster alliances across new and shifting hierarchical assemblages of citizenship and belonging (e.g. see Amin, 2012;Chowdhary and Philipose, 2018;Jackson, 2018;Thangaraj et al, 2018), uniting us even as socio-economic, cultural and political forces divide us, from one another, and the spaces and places that we choose to call "home". Figure 10: Luxs' photo showing a former pub taken-over and extended, selling cheap bedroom furniture with boxes of goods spilling out onto the pavement.…”

“…Building upon studies of informal leisure (Watson and Ratna, 2011;Thangaraj et al, 2018) and more recent sociological analyses of urban multi-culture (e.g. Jackson, 2018;Neal et al, 2018;Back et al, 2018;Valluvan, 2016;Yuval-Davis, Wemyss and Cassidy, 2018), I focus upon walking not only as a leisure pastime but also as a methodological approach, using pedestrian speech acts to explore "small" and "big" constructions and re/presentations of cityspaces. I also add to current debates about walking methodologies (see Bates and Rhys-Taylor, 2018) through a novel approach to constructing knowledge for, about, and with, familial relations.…”

Racialized capitalism: An account of its contested origins and consolidation

“…While many of these returns are being rolled back by austerity and new racisms, their imprint is still traceable in the ease with which many young people handle the lived realities of multi-ethnic life in urban Britain. At the same time, unless this everyday multiculture, painted in all its complexity by Emma Jackson (2018) and Sivamohan Valluvan (2016), finds a more organized political form it will not save us from the reactionary forces gathering at the door. That is, class will have to happen in the Thompsonian sense of social force, and it will have to happen in such a way that it consciously absorbs and demystifies the differences inscribed into its collective body by historical capitalism.…”