Abstract
Depending on one’s socio-territorial contexts, age, and time spent residing in the same place, the spatial-temporal experience of belonging is lived differently. Within this framework, this article looks at perspectives of neighborhood belonging in long-term residents aged 65 years and older. Based on the narratives of 51 people from three neighborhoods of Valparaíso, Chile, who participated in the 2019 workshops and/or in-depth interviews, I identify different types of nostalgic senses of belonging; and examine the social and spatial conditions that influence their formation. From this empirical research, I argue that these belongings are based on daily practices that refer to the past neighborhood and that, at the same time, are embodied in their current materialities. The results show, on the one hand, the role of nostalgia in the formation of a belonging, from the past to the present; and, on the other, the influence of place in these experiences. From the above, this article contributes to the conceptualization of the material dimension of nostalgic belongings and their interrelationships among nostalgias, belongings, and changes in social and physical environments.
Introduction
This article discusses results from a study on nostalgic belongings experienced by long-term residents over 65 as regards their neighborhood in Valparaíso, Chile. It is based on the narratives of 51 people who participated in workshops and/or in-depth interviews in three neighborhoods of this city during 2019. This analysis examines the socio-territorial conditions that influence the formation of these belongings.
In this work, I approach nostalgia as a creative affective force that participates in the formation of our relationships with our social and physical environment. Following Davis (1979) and Boym (2001), nostalgia does not mean only a desire to return to a past, but also a committed relationship with the present. It is an emotional resource for the (re)construction of our identities from a remembrance and reinterpretation of past (Pickering & Keightley, 2006). In reconstruction, remembrance, and reinterpretations, nostalgia is related to both time and space. Rooted in materialities, this feeling is embodied in practices that connect individuals to places (Blunt, 2003; Bonnett, 2015; Bonnett & Alexander, 2013). For this reason, nostalgia plays an important role in forming a sense of belonging to place.
Outside the above, I define the sense of belonging as an experience, a subjective-affective process that leads an individual or a collective to feel at home and secure in a place (Antonsich, 2010; Mee & Wright, 2009), to feel comfortable with themselves and with their physical and social environment (Miller, 2003). I also address the sense of belonging that develops through practices in relation to places and that contributes to the construction of identity (Bennett, 2015). This article identifies different types of nostalgic senses of belonging to place in order to demonstrate the influence of the social and territorial changes in their formation. In this framework, I argue that these belongings are based on daily practices that refer to the past neighborhood and that, at the same time, are embodied in their current materialities.
This article contributes to the conceptualization of the spatio-temporal nature of belonging. I dialogue with works developed by May and her colleagues in this field (Lewis & May, 2020; May, 2017; May & Muir, 2015) that argue for the role of temporal registers in constructing belonging to place. In this work, I build upon this literature by theorizing the material dimension of nostalgic belongings and their interrelationships among nostalgias, belongings, and social and physical environmental changes. Through the concept of nostalgic belonging, I contribute to discussions on the spatio-temporal nature of belonging by examining the role of everyday practices and the influence of socio-territorial changes on these experiences. This article furthermore resonates with research into the influence of aging on the experience of belonging to the neighborhood (Buffel et al., 2018; Lewis & Buffel, 2020). While, then, this article may contribute to a greater understanding of the relationships among older people’s social and physical environments and their level of well-being, I focus mainly on understanding their sense of nostalgic belonging in relation to their neighborhood.
Finally, this article is based on an analysis of contextualized empirical data from Chile, a national context that is seldom drawn upon in the belonging and nostalgia literature. As I have shown in another study (Colin & Iturrieta Olivares, 2020), there have been strong social-urban changes since the turn of the century – due to real estate pressure and increasingly socio-spatial fragmentation (Ariztía, 2014; Márquez & Pérez, 2008) – that have led to the emergence of a nostalgic sense of living and thinking the city and the neighborhood today. This work deepens these results and provides a complementary view to those works generally based in the Global North.
This article is structured into three sections. First, I present the two main fields of literature to which this work contributes: belonging, as spatial-temporal experiences; and nostalgia, as plural feeling. Then, I present the context of the study and its methodological strategy. Finally, I discuss the results. By analyzing participant stories, I explore their everyday practices and the changes in their socio-territorial context as key elements for understanding the relationships among nostalgias and belongings.
Belonging as spatial-temporal experiences
Belonging has previously been described in contexts of geographic mobilities: first, as a mobile, multicultural, and multiscale process in the framework of international migrations (Blunt & Bonnerjee, 2013; Ramírez, 2014); and second, as a selection process where place serves as a social differentiator and as a support for identity performativity (Savage et al., 2005). Studies have further shown the role of materialities in the construction of a sense of belonging to place (Antonsich, 2010; Mee & Wright, 2009; Miller, 2003). In this article, I expand upon these works to demonstrate that belonging is also based on the temporalities that people associate with these materialities.
In this line, May (2017) shows that time itself can be a source of belonging. Based on Bergson (1896/2004), she distinguishes two types of memories: ‘memory-in-action’, which refers to memories that are imprinted on the body and are linked to gestures, repetitions, and customs; and ‘memory-images’ of past events that dislodge us and remove us from the present. While the first is linked to a belonging in the here and now, the second is related to a ‘belonging from afar’, a comparison between the present and the past. In the latter, nostalgia is an essential element. May (2017) then establishes three types of ‘belonging from afar’, each one linked to a type of nostalgia. First, the experience of a ‘temporal dislocation’, which is linked to the sensation of being disconnected from the present by belonging to an older generation, a ‘reluctant nostalgia’; second, the experience of a ‘temporal displacement’ from happy memories to a lost place, a ‘place nostalgia’; and third, the experience of a ‘temporal migration’ from happy memories to a lost past that is considered better than the present, a ‘nostalgia era’. Notably, while that study demonstrates the relationships among memories, nostalgias and belongings, it ignores place as a key element in these processes. Indeed, I argue here that belonging is a temporal experience as mediated by place. That is, a temporal experience formed from an embodied relationship with the material environment.
In the case of Clarement Court (Edinburgh, Scotland), for example, Lewis and May (2020) addressed this issue by exploring the various ways in which the residents understand the past, present, and future of the building, and how these temporalities informed their sense of belonging to place. They proposed three material-temporal registers of belonging, associated with different temporal reasonings linked to the built environment: an ‘elastic temporal’ reasoning, based on a sense of belonging nostalgic for a lost sense of community, and materialized in changes to the built and social environment in the present; a ‘constricted temporal’ reasoning, with a belonging rooted in the present and critical of the political and social commitments of the community in the face of a deteriorating environment; and a ‘complex temporal’ reasoning, characterized by a future-oriented belonging based on a nostalgic desire for the original past building. For these authors, the sense of belonging is felt by people who imagine themselves in relation to different temporalities across places, and through which nostalgia is a central element in the understanding of these temporal-material experiences.
From the above foundations, this article projects new findings by delving into understandings of the material dimensions and the influence of changing social-territorial contexts in forming nostalgic belongings to place. This work is framed in Chile, a country renowned for its neoliberal urban policies that produce socio-spatial fragmentation and socio-economic inequalities in the organization of institutions and the market, as well as in the daily lives of its inhabitants (Ariztía, 2014; Márquez & Pérez, 2008). These policies have also favored real estate pressures, causing rapid and brutal socio-material changes. Since the 2000s, different forms of resistance to these processes have emerged. While some groups value and defend local communities, their self-management and self-care (Guëll & Yopo Díaz; 2021; Pérez, 2018; Tironi & Rodríguez-Giralt, 2017), others seek to protect and visibilize them in urban spaces (Palacios, 2018). It is in this context of change and social tension that the article is interested in nostalgia as a way of making sense of the current world. For that, I focus on people over 65 years old, for two reasons: first, people experience a greater sense of nostalgic belonging as they age, particularly from 50 onwards (May, 2017; May & Muir, 2015); and second, older people have a tendency to place greater importance on neighborhood life because of the time spent at home, the length of time they have lived in the same area, their dependence on neighborhood supports, and their emotional attachment to the neighborhood community (Buffel et al., 2018). Below, I provide definitional elements of nostalgia as an emotional experience, both temporal and spatial.
Nostalgia as plural feeling
In this section, I build on Halbwachs (1950) and De Certeau (1994), who demonstrated the role of space as a scaffold for memories and in sustaining nostalgia. Like other authors (Blunt, 2003; Bonnett, 2015; Bonnett & Alexander, 2013), I then approach nostalgia as an experience that is not only temporal but also spatial – i.e., triggered by, and taking shape in, places via individual and/or shared practices. The following argument thus outlines the formation of nostalgic types of neighborhood belongings. In this framework, the practices described by the participants that support their nostalgic stories refer, for example, to quotidian walks in the neighborhood, shopping at the same neighborhood stores, and sharing moments with neighbors in public spaces or in instances organized by neighborhood institutions. They also incorporate those of not leaving their residences, or limiting their sociability to family relationships.
Etymologically composed of two Greek words – nostos, the return, and algos, suffering – nostalgia as a concept was first created in the 17th century by the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer to characterize a medical phenomenon considered at that time a psychological pathology (Davis, 1979). Since the end of the 20th century, especially given the multiplication of references to the past, nostalgia has since often been understood as a resistance to change based on an idealization of the past (Shaw & Chase, 1989). In this epoch of the literature, the nostalgia addressed is mainly of a ‘restorative’ dimension (Boym, 2001), that is, as an emotion related to the idea of a return to a ‘golden age’, based on contemporary anxieties, uncertainties and fears caused by a feeling of loss of identity.
Nostalgia is not, however, merely a desire to identically reproduce some past; rather, it is triggered from a reinterpretation of memories based on values of the present (Pickering & Keightley, 2006). According to Boym (2001), nostalgia can be ‘reflexive’, meaning a reconstruction of oneself in the present from a critical and reflexive look at the past, which opens the possibility of building a future. Taking this aspect of it, nostalgia becomes a central element in reconstructing a sense of belonging and continuity in neighborhood inhabitants facing perceptions of socio-spatial changes. Indeed, Lewis (2016) showed how nostalgia is materialized through narratives and shared memories in a neighborhood of older adults in East Manchester. Additionally, Degnen (2016) demonstrated how older adults in Dodworth (England) today generate embodied links with place through their memory practices and experiences. In my argument that it is central to these nostalgic experiences, I will show how place influences the formation of nostalgic neighborhood belongings across different neighborhood contexts in Valparaíso, Chile.
The study context
This study is part of a research project on nostalgic experiences of neighborhoods as lived by their inhabitants in Valparaíso, Chile. One of Chile’s main ports, the city itself holds 296,655 inhabitants in a conurbation of 951,480 (Instituto Nacional de la Estadística [INE], 2018). It is structured into two parts: the plan (‘flats’), where most economic activities are concentrated, and the 42 surrounding cerros (‘hills’), where most inhabitants live. Valparaíso, as a research site, is conducive to the study of urban nostalgias due to the socio-territorial changes that have affected its lifestyles and life praxis since the end of the 20th century. Here, a unique, yet familiar, type of nostalgia arises in response to the disappearing neighborhood life, the loss of old families, the arrival of new residents, the closure of former economic activities and/or, depending on the neighborhood, the construction of new buildings. These nostalgias are expressed in the daily conversations of its inhabitants, and reflect ways of inhabiting and thinking about the current city (Colin & Iturrieta Olivares, 2020). In this framework, this research focuses on long-term residents of three sectors in the hills of this city.
The Cerro Esperanza and Cerro Barón are two historically working-class neighborhoods which developed in the 19th century, and are today residential sectors of 7,972 and 7,630 inhabitants, respectively (INE, 2018). Esperanza is inhabited by a medium to medium-high socio-economic population; and Barón, medium to medium-low. Although the lower part of Esperanza neighborhood (the lower part of the hill) is protected as a historical conservation area, it has undergone different changes in socio-cultural and generational terms. In addition to these changes, some sectors of Cerro Barón – near the center of the city – have experienced strong pressures since the turn of the century regarding real estate and new high-rise buildings. The third study location is the sector named Playa Ancha Alto (Alto, or ‘Upper’, because of its location in the high part of the hill), populated during the second part of the 20th century by Chilean state urban planning projects to aid access to housing. The 14,241 inhabitants (INE, 2018) of this much larger territory are divided into different sectors that were built progressively in different periods from the 1960s to the 1980s. This area belongs to the lower and lower-middle socioeconomic categories, and is considered socio-economically vulnerable by local institutions.
These research locations provided access to different groupings of people across socio-economic backgrounds and trajectories, and thus a more diverse sample. Some participants have lived in historical areas, protected from major material changes since they were born; others are located in places that have undergone significant social and material changes in recent years; and still others have lived in more recently built areas of older neighborhoods, as is the case of Playa Ancha Alto, and continue to live there today. Accordingly, the study addresses the sense of belonging to the neighborhood across different socio-territorial contexts.
The research design
The results discussed in this article result from workshops with older adults in the three study neighborhoods in 2019, presenting and discussing the theme of ‘remembering my neighborhood’. By favoring their participation and empowerment in the proposed activities, this strategy efficaciously incorporated participant opinions into the production of knowledge (Ward & Barnes, 2016), and further generated trust among researchers and participants. Some of the participant contributions gathered on the memories of these neighborhoods were additionally displayed in a local photographic exhibition, which sparked further discussions and motivated sharing.
Workshops in each neighborhood received local support (notifications, invitations, and physical spaces) from their respective Family Health Centers (Centro de Salud Familiar, CESFAM), a municipal institution that promotes initiatives aimed at older people. Participant selection sought those who were: aged 65 years or over; living in the neighborhood; and belonging to an old family (i.e., considered first arrivals to the neighborhood). The interdisciplinary research team (geography, sociology, and social work) was composed of the principal investigator and three other assistant professionals who participated in the organization, development, and analysis of the information produced. Workshops were based on four main activities: ‘drawing’, or ‘writing’ their neighborhood; mapping the past and present places that the participants consider to be structural or important to their neighborhood; presenting and narrating the history of personal objects brought in (photographs, past or present objects of daily life) as connected to their experience of the neighborhood; and commenting on current photographs of the neighborhood taken by the research team to elicit discussion on participants’ emotional relationships to place and the current situation.
Activities were adapted to the different groups and contexts. In the Esperanza neighborhood, workshops were carried out over four sessions of two hours with 13 participants; in Barón, over six sessions of two hours with 10 participants; and, in Playa Ancha Alto, there were two different groups: one of eight people over six sessions of two hours, and another of 15 people over two sessions of two hours. In addition, the research team developed in-depth interviews to either integrate inhabitants who, for health reasons, could not participate in the workshops, or to deepen the experiences of previous workshop participants. In total, six interviews were conducted in the Esperanza neighborhood, four in Barón, and three in Playa Ancha Alto. A total of 51 people participated in this study. The sample is heterogeneous in socio-economic terms, age (68–84 years old), and in terms of the trajectories lived in each neighborhood. Some were born in the same sector or even, sometimes, in the same house where they still live. Others arrived as children or adolescents with their parents. Finally, and as was mainly the case of Playa Ancha Alto, some participants came to their new homes as adults in spaces they did not previously inhabit.
My findings derive from the analysis of their narratives during these instances. The information produced allowed the elaboration of four typologies for categories of neighborhood belonging: one of the ‘anti-nostalgic’ type, and three of the nostalgic type. I present these below.
Anti-nostalgic belonging
When describing their current neighborhood, most participants first refer to memories of ‘how it used to be’ and compare them to their current perceptions of the situation. However, although some (n = 8) feel they are a part of their neighborhood and share their enthusiasm of remembering the neighborhood before, they do not mobilize nostalgia in expressing their neighborhood belonging. These participants were between 68 and 75 years old, living in the oldest sectors of Esperanza and Barón, which have not changed much materially. Although they have transitioned to retired life, these participants still have an active social life in their neighborhood. To take up the expression proposed by May (2017, p. 406), their stories reveal an ‘anti-nostalgic’ sense of belonging which is explained by a ‘linear developmental trajectory where rather than “clinging to” old memories, [these persons] say they have “got on” with their lives’. The memories that they evoke are generally ‘memories-in-action’, to take up again the typology of Bergson used by May (2017): that is, memories that are constructed from their practices, routines, and customs in the present – a present that, admittedly, is not so different from the past.
This is the case of Carla,
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68 years old, recently retired and living on Cerro Esperanza. She feels very attached to her neighborhood. As she explains: Personally, I have always chosen to live on this hill, I have lived elsewhere and I just wanted to go back home – even when I was abroad and had the possibility to stay, I like this place a lot. I have always liked this hill.
For Carla, the past does not play a fundamental role in the construction of her current belonging in the neighborhood. She explains why she maintains her old social relationships and friendships from the school located in the same neighborhood: ‘I still have friends from my childhood who join me with all their kids [. . .] the other day we had a gathering at my house and there were more than 50 of us.’ Furthermore, she is still active in the neighborhood, participating in different friendship groups and continuing activities with neighbors her age in the CESFAM – or other – community spaces in the neighborhood. In the workshop, she explains not feeling nostalgia because ‘I do a lot of things, maybe I don’t have time to be nostalgic about the past.’
However, not having nostalgia for the past does not exclude mobilizing memory-images of the past in the present. During the workshop activities, she consistently and openly shared childhood memories, happy memories of her family life, or anecdotes from the past neighborhood. Even though she is aware of the irreversibility of time that is underlying and that activates the nostalgic feeling (Pickering & Keightley, 2006), she seems not to dwell on the feeling in her stories when she relates her past experiences in the neighborhood.
A similar situation comes from Gustavo, in his seventies, and who has lived all his life in Cerro Barón. A retired architect, he relates to the past through historical data and personal memories with which he does not associate nostalgia. For him, ‘times change’ and so it does not make sense to ‘stay in the past’. Within this framework, he rejects any discomfort in the face of the urban transformations experienced in his neighborhood, and instead insists on the need to adapt to the changes that make certain practices and/or places disappear, even when the loss implies nostalgia: I miss many things – it’s not that I am against what is being lost or what has been lost – no, I miss these things, but I need to be realistic, too. Some things are no longer justified [. . .] in every order of things, things change.
In this anti-nostalgia profile, participants expressed their sense of belonging from their current activities, and appear to associate nostalgia with stagnation or inactivity. I posit that the rejection of nostalgia when talking about their emotional relationships to the current neighborhood is a reaffirmation of their identity as an active person in this place. In both cases, despite being aware of the changes that have occurred or are occurring in the neighborhood, they continue to maintain the same sense of belonging as in the past. They maintain the same social activities with the same people and in the same places that continue to exist. They do not express feeling of loss, and their relationships with place, people, and practices remain unchanged.
Three types of nostalgic neighborhood belonging
The senses of belonging from the past expressed by the majority of participants (n = 43) revolved around nostalgia as a central element. From these I was able to thus identify three categories of nostalgic neighborhood belonging, below, each linked to different socio-territorial contexts and daily practices.
Uprooted nostalgic belonging
In this category, we find people (n = 6) who express nostalgia for the neighborhood where they lived before, that is, in a different temporal and spatial location. This group included people between 78 and 84 years old who have lived in Playa Ancha Alto for 45 years and more. They arrived in the neighborhood during their adult life, between 30 and 40 years of age. They do not feel a sense of belonging to this neighborhood – either in the past or in the present – which they particularly attribute to inescapable feelings of insecurity due to crime, distant or unlikeable neighbors, or to an inability to project themselves into this neighborhood. As pointed out by Fields (2011), inhabitants in depressed and stigmatized neighborhoods may wish to distance themselves, which leads them to experience a ‘temporal dislocation’ (May, 2017; May & Muir, 2015), feeling like they do not fit in or choosing not to commit themselves to the creation of neighborhood life. In this category, their relationship with the present is dominated by the feeling of loss. A loss of a time and a space which leads them to ignore the present and value the past.
In the Playa Ancha Alto workshops, we sat with women who had followed their parents or their husbands to live in this place. This is the case, for example, of Sandra, a retired 80-year-old who has lived in Playa Ancha Alto since the 1970s. She was born in the capital and worked as a schoolteacher there. She came to live in Playa Ancha Alto after marrying a sailor from the port of Valparaíso. However, because of her work in Santiago, she never developed a sense of belonging in the neighborhood where she continues to live until today: I did not know what the life of a sailor was like. He went out sailing and I worked at the school [in Santiago]. He would visit me in Santiago, and I would come to Valparaíso on Saturdays, until one day he told me ‘all right, I’m done working’. But he would still go out walking, or sailing. And I had to keep running back and forth between Santiago [to keep working] as the director [of the school in Santiago] would allow me to.
Notably, Playa Ancha Alto was built through state policies meant to improve access to housing for low-income families suffering from poor living conditions. In this context, some of these inhabitants feel their life in this place was imposed, and moving symbolizes an emotional break with the places and periods of before. The case of Yesika, 83 years old, reflects this situation well. She lived a part of her life in another neighborhood of Valparaíso, Cerro Florida. After an earthquake damaged her home, however, she came to live in Playa Ancha Alto in 1965 thanks to state subsidies. However, the locus of her memories and nostalgia remain in her previous neighborhood, and she feels neither attachment nor nostalgia for the current one. The other neighborhood is where she studied, where she would meet with her family, and where she had her first child. Yesika feels a strong sense of belonging to this other place where she lived before, a place she still frequents, and whenever she has the chance she goes to visit. Her memory-images take her back to Cerro Florida – whenever she refers to Playa Ancha, she immediately feels a desire to return to Cerro Florida. Her regular practices within her urban space – as well as her desires and projections – are oriented towards this other place.
Cerro Florida is always on my mind – my memories, everything, my childhood, my youth, the good things, the bad things – one day I hope to return there to live and die there because it is sad, sad when one leaves.
People in Yesika’s situation live in a neighborhood that they do not value and with which they do not associate happy memories. Faced with this situation, they yearn for another space in which they cannot live today. They are people who, despite sharing a desire to leave their current stigmatized neighborhood, cannot afford to live in other sectors of the city due to lack of economic resources. From this case study, I suggest that their nostalgia for the other place reveals a loss of value of the present and a deep malaise linked to a feeling of uprooting that prevents them from building a belonging to their current place. As a result, today they do not leave their homes, they fear public space and do not seek to develop neighborhood ties. In May’s terms (2017), they feel a ‘reluctant nostalgia’ that leads them to find an emotional refuge in a past lived elsewhere, without connection or commitment to their current living space.
In the other two categories of nostalgic belonging that I describe below, the residents have not felt uprooted from their place of belonging. While feelings of loss exist, they do not lead them to reject the present. We will see that, in contrast to the uprooted nostalgic belonging, nostalgia is used in the two other categories as a support to think about the current situation, leading to daily practices in the neighborhood. Within this framework, it does not translate into a desire to return, but rather with a process of resignification of the present within the gaze of the past. However, I argue this resignification varies with the degree of social and material neighborhood changes.
Ontological nostalgic belonging
The stories of some participants (n = 15) showed another type of nostalgic belonging based on those places that have materially remained the same. In their stories, the buildings, the streets, the objects that make up the current neighborhood are a support for memory-images of previous moments, periods, and practices. This belonging is based on a ‘place nostalgia’ evoked by May (2017, p. 409) that ‘is directed toward a particular place lost in time’ and that is based on a ‘temporal displacement’ experienced at the moment of remembering past moments with the lost places. In the present case, ‘temporal displacement’ is experienced from places that people have continued to occupy, and where they continue their life practices over time. This belonging was expressed by men and women between 74 and 80, living in the old sectors of Esperanza and Barón. They are heirs to the family home in which they have lived most – or all – of their lives. Today, they still live in the same house and continue to travel in their daily lives to the same places. As a result, they live in the places that themselves are reminders of the persons and activities that were relevant to their past lives. In contrast to the uprooted nostalgic belonging, this sense of belonging is based on the emotional ties generated from the unchanged material dimensions of the neighborhood where they are living today. There are no expressions of feeling dislocated, and they do not experience uprooting. Instead, they claim affective attachment to the barrio.
This is the case of Katia, 74 years old, retired and living in the Esperanza neighborhood, who has always lived in the same house that belonged to her parents. During the first activity of the workshop, she gets animated describing the landscape she sees from her window: Every day I wake up and the first thing you see is this, this view – I have it so deeply ingrained here because, like I was telling you, I was born in the same house 74 years ago. And for 74 years I have been walking around this hill.
Katia is considered by her neighbors as an ‘important character’ of the neighborhood. She has the habit of writing about the neighborhood and its history. She likes to make people relive past moments and share them with others, and actively participates in different ‘guided tours’ organized by the local CESFAM regarding the heritage of the neighborhood, often sharing her own memories linked to the places shown to the participants. During the workshop, the nostalgia that she mobilizes in her stories is rooted in the materiality of the current neighborhood, in its buildings and streets, which makes her remember moments and people no longer with us today. Through her nostalgic narratives about the neighborhood, she performs her own identity as an essential member of the community, protector, and transmitter of the memories of the past (Bennett, 2015).
In the same sense, another inhabitant, Karen, a former school teacher who retired at 80 years old and inhabitant of Cerro Barón, explains ‘here, I walk down a street, I see people, “hello, hello, how are you”, I remember, my head is always full, full of memories’. She lives in the same house where she was born, which belonged to her maternal grandparents. Her mother and four siblings were also born in this same house. The reminiscences triggered by a persisting material scenario, and its continued practice, are a source of wellbeing, happiness and, sometimes, pride in being part of the neighborhood. In this sense, she explains that: ‘if I go somewhere else, I will be left without a past, without a history, everything will be erased – I would start to, to vibrate with other things, with other elements, in other places, that is, I would no longer be me’. Karen associates nostalgia with the memory-images that arise from the places with which she lives in her daily life. She insists on her ‘family memories’ associated with her house and her neighborhood. In Karen’s case, these family stories and memories materialize in the current neighborhood, transforming it into a support for her sense of belonging and identity. Like Katia, Karen performs her identity through the narration of these memory-images associated with the places. In both cases, the physical and social environment appear in their stories as a foundational space for their identities, showing and supporting their own history and belonging to the place and the community (Leach, 2002).
From these case studies, I find May’s work (2017) applicable also at the neighborhood scale, showing how place nostalgia takes shape through spatial practices and serves as support for these people to build a nostalgic sense of belonging in the present. In this sense, I affirm that this belonging is an ‘ontological belonging’ that, according to Bennett (2015, p. 956), ‘arises through an attachment to place created over time, intersubjective relationships to others in the place and inalienable relationships to the materiality of the place’. In the case of the ‘nostalgic ontological belonging’, the participants describe the neighborhood from their own practices, from their sensations and emotions when they walk around the neighborhood and remember, inspired by re-experiencing the materiality of the neighborhood. Walking and associating memories, names, and emotions with the buildings, streets, views, or objects that make up the neighborhood serve to give meaning to their place in the present.
In short, this nostalgic ontological belonging is based on the selected memory-images about past life in/of the neighborhood that activate a nostalgia for that which was previously lived and remembered. In this framework, the construction of nostalgic belonging is based on memories embodied in the materialities of the neighborhood that have not changed. Here, family and personal memories dominate and contribute to better living in the present. These people can rely on the neighborhood’s material continuity to think about their past, in the present. But, when significant material changes have occurred in the neighborhood, the relationship among nostalgia, belonging, and place takes another form. I present this last category below.
Dystopian nostalgic belonging
The final group of participants (n = 22) gave dystopian representations of the neighborhood in supporting their sense of belonging to the place today. This group, 70 to 80 years old and living in sectors of all three neighborhoods, experience, and are keenly aware of, the social and material changes. They associate changes in social life with the material transformations of the neighborhood: modernization, real estate pressures, or new housing constructions with new inhabitants. They consider these changes responsible for the loss of neighborhood life and fellowship. Here, dystopian representations of the neighborhood today are generated from an uneasiness experienced from a loss of social fabric from before, the disappearance of meeting places, of the practices, of the uses, and of the coexistences shared among neighbors. In contrast with the previous category – in which people resignified place based on family and personal memories – the stories here reveal a longing for the values and the past life shared by a generation of people that has partially disappeared today.
This type of story is shared by Karina, 72 years old, retired and inhabitant of Barón: We arrived to this neighborhood sixty years ago, and in all those years the whole sector has changed considerably. For example, before, the way our families were, our mothers would come outside with us, talk to each other on the sidewalks, and when the sun started to go down, we would all go home, obedient, because our parents were respected.
In recent years, the material and socio-demographic changes that Cerro Barón has experienced due to real estate pressures, the arrival of new inhabitants, and the departure of some of the old families from the neighborhood are salient for these participants. In contrast with Karen, who has lived in an unchanged sector of the same neighborhood, Karina has lived in radically transformed places over the past 20 years. In her narratives, nostalgia is based on memory-images of affective relationships between inhabitants and sociabilities that today, according to her, are disappearing due to the departure of some of the old families and the construction of new buildings. I argue that it reveals a ‘dystopian nostalgic belonging’ based on a nostalgia linked to the comparison between the past and the present and the subsequent idea of generational loss. According to May and Muir (2015, p. 7), ‘generation as a cultural reference group (“people of my generation”) can act as a source of belonging and of collective understandings of what it means to be “us”’. In her stories about the changes, Karina expresses a feeling of loss of the neighborhood community that she had associated with her generation of inhabitants. She recounts loss of the group of people that lived with her when she arrived to the neighborhood. In this context, her sense of belonging is based on memories of practices shared in the past with her generation. However, this situation does not mean a detachment from the present. For example, today, Karina lives in the house of her deceased mother, with her daughter, and shares her joy in composing her current life with the memory-images of the time when her mother and aunts were still alive. For her, this house represents the past social life of her neighborhood. Maintaining it signifies protecting the past social memories of this place. She also continues to meet in neighborhood social clubs with a group of people of her ‘generation’ with whom she shares this critique of the present from the memory-images of the past. In the case of Karina, nostalgia for the past neighborhood leads to affective and embodied ties with some places in the present that allow her to bring this past to life in the present.
We find this same type of belonging in the story of Horacio, a 78-year-old retiree and inhabitant of Playa Ancha Alto. In the workshop, he shares his disappointment: ‘in these blocks, people are always changing – they leave, they sell and new people come – then it costs more, new people don’t want anything to do with the old ones, or the old ones with the new ones’. In this case, he longs for the social life he had when he arrived in the neighborhood in 1976, when the inhabitants ‘were more united’ and were ‘all new’ in this place. The lament over the ‘loss of unity’ and ‘togetherness’ of former community life, characteristic of older residents (Buffel et al., 2018), is central to his narrative of the neighborhood. For him, the recent new constructions in his sector and the arrival of new inhabitants in his own building are responsible for these social changes. In Horacio’s case, the nostalgia for his generation of ‘first arrivals’ is even more present in his memories of the soccer sports activities that contributed to that belief and that played a central role in neighborhood sociabilities: ‘Of course, [we had] companionship. We went out to meet on the soccer field, to talk more, there was more unity, more barrio.’ He regrets the decline of this sport activity that, according to him, is due to the lesser participation of inhabitants who arrived after his generation. However, today, he is proud of a new generation of inhabitants who are attempting to reactivate the soccer league; and of his grandchild, who has recently published a booklet about the neighborhood’s history. Today, Horacio maintains relationships with the soccer club, where he is invited to give advice on management and to participate in different social and political instances of the neighborhood.
In contrast with the uprooted nostalgic belonging, this nostalgic belonging is linked to people who have lived part or all their life in the same neighborhood where they have developed affective links with people from their ‘generation’. It is based on a reflexive nostalgia (Boym, 2001) that induces a critical view of the present. In the face of social-territorial transformations, dystopian representations of generational loss serve as support to generate alternative ways for remembering and sustaining emotional relationships in/with the current neighborhood through some places and social practices. Unlike nostalgic ontological belonging based on the continuity of the material continuity, this nostalgic belonging is supported by memories about past social relationships and sociabilities. It is based on a quest to reconstruct social affective links today, despite the changes in the neighborhood.
Conclusion
This article contributes to the understanding of nostalgia as a support in the construction of a sense of neighborhood belonging. Based on empirical research in three neighborhoods in Valparaíso, Chile, this work focuses on the nostalgic and spatio-temporal natures of ‘belonging from afar’ (May, 2017), and contributes to the conceptualization of the interrelationships among nostalgias, belongings, and the changes in social and physical environments.
On the one hand, the participants are all Chileans, older adults, and long-term residents. However, they are not of the same social or residential trajectory, nor have they experienced the same living conditions or urban changes in their neighborhoods. It is precisely these elements that influence the type of nostalgic belonging experienced. Notwithstanding, in each of these diverse situations, participants seek to rebuild or resignify their sense of belonging. While uprooted nostalgic belonging reveals a longing for a past, lost, and desired place in the present, ontological nostalgic belonging is based on a resignification of the past from the materialities that persist in the present and that serve to support resignifying personal and family memories. Finally, the dystopian nostalgic belonging develops from a critical view of social and material neighborhood changes, which supports their thinking of and reconstructing a sense of belonging in the present from their memories of the past social life.
On the other hand, depending on the places and times to which it refers, nostalgia may be either an obstacle or an emotional resource to the formation of a sense of neighborhood belonging to the present. This article thus demonstrates the complex nature of nostalgia located in an interconnection among the social, temporal, and spatial (Blunt, 2003). In the different cases studied, this feeling is not only directed towards the past, but also – and above all – formed from a relationship (at times, conflicting) with the present (Pickering & Keightley, 2006) and, therefore, with the places and socio-spatial contexts in which inhabitants live in their daily lives. In this framework, even when people express a desire to return to another time and place, they must do so in reference to the present, be it critical or otherwise.
Finally, this study of nostalgic belongings of older people in their neighborhood contributes to analyses of how everyday practices interweave with neighborhood materialities. In this perspective, I show that each nostalgic belonging is supported by a type of neighborhood praxis developed in the everyday. The uprooted nostalgic belonging is linked to an avoidance of life practices in the neighborhood, and instead favors a restoring nostalgia for the place where one used to belong. The participants seek to maintain their affective bond with this other place, going there regularly or idealizing it in their nostalgic stories. The ontological nostalgic belonging is based on an embodied nostalgia linked to the materialities of the neighborhood. This belonging is based on a reinterpretation and a resignification of the past, and therefore stems from a reflexive nostalgia (Boym, 2001). Finally, the dystopian nostalgic belonging is present among people who do not practice or live the neighborhood in the same way as before, due to aging and/or changes in neighborhood sociabilities. Faced with this situation, they express a nostalgia for the old neighborhood lifestyles, which is based on the feeling of generational loss (May & Muir, 2015). This does not, however, necessarily mean a disengagement with the present; at times, it may serve as a support for them to have a look at the neighborhood of today and think about how they themselves have changed.
In short, this study on nostalgic belonging reveals how participants construct their own identity in the present. In this context, for the participants, talking about the old neighborhood means talking about themselves, their own changes, and their own nostalgia for how they themselves used to be. Through place, they embody the loss of neighborhood ties, the sociabilities of the past, and – more generally – the socio-urban changes in light of their own past experiences. Their nostalgia for the past is thus a desire to re-encounter the foundations of their belonging from before, with themselves; this is nostalgic belonging.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Alexandra Benitt, Macarena Rojas Mora, and Natalie Calderón for their participation in the fieldwork and all the participants of the study for accepting to share their experiences and memories. He thanks the local support received from the Family Health Centers of each neighborhood. Finally, the author thanks Professor Carolina Pinto and Professor Aude Argouse for their revisions and suggestions.
Funding
The research was supported by ANID Chile under the FONDECYT project n°11180372.