Multiculture, Place and Belonging: Green Materialities and Urban Parks

• In Event: 563 - Section on Community and Urban Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 09. Sustainability and the City

Abstract

Situating itself in encounter and public space debates this paper uses qualitative data from the authors’ current UK based research project to examine how urban parks, with their leisure and pleasure associations, can be understood as sites of routine encounter, sharing and mixing among super-diverse local populations. We argue that the green materialities of parks play a central role in these processes and suggest that parks are animating spaces generating social interactions, connections and place affinities across ethnic and cultural difference. In using parks as a lens to examine urban multiculture in England and senses of attachment the paper critically reflects on research practices for understanding and describing heterogeneous formations of multiculture and argues that the project’s research design, the fieldwork methods and conceptual resources represent an attempt to appropriately respond to research work with complexly different places and populations.

Authors

• Sarah Neal, University of Surrey

• Katy Bennett, University of Leicester

• Allan Cochrane, Open University

• Hannah Jones, University of Warwick

• Giles Mohan, Open University