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Paper short abstract:

Gentrification modifies the materiality of the environment which affects residents’ experience and ways of emplacement, and creates atmospheres of (dis-)belonging to the neighbourhood. It is through everyday practices that residents challenge, negotiate and deal with such transformation processes.

Paper long abstract:

Kreuzberg, an inner-city area in Berlin, Germany, has experienced a diversification of urban popula-tions since the reunification in 1989. Ongoing transformations linked to urban re-structuring process-es, increased mobility and migration, have resulted in a growing polarization of the housing market, processes of upscaling and displacement, with gentrification gaining momentum. This affects how residents experience living in the neighbourhood, how they relate to the neighbourhood and how they emplace themselves individually and collectively. This ethnographic study explores neighbourhood as a material and affective space shaping and shaped by everyday practices, experiences, social relations, memories and imaginations. It looks at how inhabitants experience the altered materiality in the built environment, what atmosphere those alterations create for the residents, how it shapes their sense of belonging to the neighbourhood, and how they challenge, negotiate and deal with those changes through their everyday material, social and spatial practices. It argues that the material alterations in the built environment, such as fences, paved footpaths or renovated facades, but also everyday traces like broken glass bottles in the street, graffiti on the wall, guerrilla flowerbeds and DYI-furniture in buffer strips, create an atmosphere of change, but also of contestation, affecting notions of belonging and dis-belonging to the neighbourhood.