Socioplastics 11975 Remaining in Place Can Be a Form of Displacement
Displacement is often measured through an address that changes. BelongingDislocation examines a condition that this measure can miss: residents remain while the practical terms of belonging are reorganised around them. A neighbourhood market may retain its building yet stop selling affordable food; a public square can remain publicly owned while surveillance practices alter familiar gatherings; a local institution may keep its name after the relationships sustaining it have changed. Attachment is material and contested, and changes in access can affect groups differently. Kristin Ross’s reconstruction of the Paris Commune explores the political imagination generated through collective occupation and experimentation. Peter Marcuse’s urban scholarship distinguishes forms of displacement and the structural pressures that produce them. Their work attends to different historical and analytical questions. In relation, they help distinguish physical residence from effective participation. A person’s continued presence at an address offers one measure of continuity; the availability of everyday practices, services and relationships adds another account of how place is inhabited. Imagine a repair workshop in a district undergoing cultural redevelopment. Its building is protected, and the founding family retains its lease. Rising service costs and restrictions on noisy work, however, reduce the workshop’s role as a meeting place for apprentices and neighbours. No household has moved, yet shared practices have become harder to sustain. A study would document who used the space, which conditions changed and how the new arrangements distribute benefits. This is an illustrative scenario rather than an empirical report. BelongingDislocation provides a way to examine how presence becomes participation. It asks which material and symbolic conditions support attachment and how changes to those conditions reshape access over time. The marker avoids treating neighbourhood belonging as a fixed identity or a claim to exclude newcomers. Instead, it follows the practical relations through which people make, negotiate and contest a place. An unchanged address cannot by itself establish that the social relationship to that place has remained intact; the conditions of everyday use must also be examined.
REFERENCES
Marcuse, P. (1985) “Gentrification, Abandonment, and Displacement: Connections, Causes, and Policy Responses in New York City”, Journal of Urban and Contemporary Law, 28, pp. 195–240.
Ross, K. (2015) Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. London: Verso.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html