Elective Belonging

Definition

Elective belonging names the mode of place attachment chosen on the basis of cultural preferences or cultural capital rather than inherited community ties — the concept of Savage, Bagnall & Longhurst's Globalisation & Belonging (2005), which replaced the sociological picture of belonging-as-given with belonging-as-chosen. The wiki's account comes from Røe's Skjettenbyen study, which extends the concept in a political direction: the architect-resident's identification with the housing design "may be seen as an ideological and politically motivated version of what Savage et al. (2005) calls 'elective belonging', a belonging which is chosen on the basis of cultural preferences or cultural capital, rather than traditional community attachment. In this case it is the architecture, the plan, and the political idea behind it, which the architect identifies with and thereby creates a sense of belonging" (p. 547). The elective object is not a neighbourhood's social composition but a design and its ideology — belonging through architectural discourse itself.

Røe adds two further discriminations. First, the elective attachment "may also be based on a wish to be associated with a place with certain socio-demographic or socio-economic characteristics" — choosing Skjettenbyen "compared to the more 'snobbish areas' in the western parts of Oslo" as "an argument for choosing Skjettenbyen as a place to live and to raise children" (p. 547): election of a class-position as much as of a design. Second, the mechanism is Bourdieusian: "According to Dovey's (2005) interpretation of Bourdieu's view on art, the difference in preferences for particular architectural styles, leads to social distinctions between people, or divisions between those who do and do not appreciate certain styles… But it is far from neutral, or natural, and the distinctions between modernists and, for example, neo-traditionalists are very marked in architectural critique and discourse" (p. 547). The concept's counter-term within the same source is the non-elective belonging of the other inhabitants: "For others, without the context-specific cultural capital and habitus (Bourdieu, 1984), in part coming from architectural and planning education of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the sense of place-based belonging was more general, and social capital seemed to be of greater importance" (pp. 547–548).

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Røe ingest; Savage et al.'s original formulation (and its gentrification afterlife) awaits a direct source.

Key Thinkers

• Per Gunnar Røe — the concept's ideological extension: elective belonging through identification with architecture, plan and political idea; the class-association motive; the habitus condition (2015).
• Mike Savage, Gaynor Bagnall & Brian Longhurst (not yet paged — see log) — Globalisation & Belonging (Sage, 2005): the concept's originators, cited p. 547.
• Pierre Bourdieu — the theoretical substrate: Distinction (1984) on taste and cultural capital; the habitus as what makes some attachments elective and others general.
• Kim Dovey — "The silent complicity of architecture" (2005), Røe's bridge from Bourdieu's aesthetics to architectural style-preference as social distinction; now paged, with Becoming Places ingested — see Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) and the habitus/taste registers.

Related Concepts

• home — the concept's parent field: elective belonging is one mode of the home's affective claim ("a process of identification, of articulation of affect. Homes, we feel, are ours") — here the identification is with a design programme.
• habitus — the condition of electivity: without the "context-specific cultural capital and habitus… coming from architectural and planning education," belonging reverts to the general and social form.
• social-capital — the counter-mode: attachment through friends, strong and weak ties built over residence time — belonging as accumulated, not elected.
• micro-places — where the non-elective belonging actually attaches: not the housing area as a whole ("it is too big") but the small road and the group of neighbours.
• suburbanism — the cluster where the concept does its wiki work: the taste split between modernist architect-residents and "matchbox-houses" critics as suburban culture's internal class line.
• taste — the aesthetic mechanism: style preference as distinction (Bourdieu via Dovey).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Construction of a Suburb (Røe 2015) — the concept's founding source in this wiki: the "ideological and politically motivated version" formulation (p. 547); the snobbish-areas contrast (p. 547); the Dovey/Bourdieu distinction mechanism (p. 547); the habitus condition and the general, social-capital-based belonging of the non-elective majority (pp. 547–548); and the finding that "The cultural belonging, or belonging based on cultural identification, was only expressed by the architect" (p. 547).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

Open Questions

• Is "ideological elective belonging" a species of Savage et al.'s concept or a third mode between the elective and the traditional — belonging to a project rather than to a place's social composition?
• Can the elective mode be occupied by non-experts? Kari's anti-aesthetic stance ("I haven't chosen this because of the architecture") is also a choice made in a discourse field — is dis-identification with a design a form of elective belonging, or its refusal?
• Does the concept scale from the housing estate to the city? Savage's own work ties elective belonging to gentrification; what would it mean for the wiki's iconic-architecture cluster (identification with a building as belonging)?
• Røe's non-elective majority build "social (biographical) capital" over decades. Is elective belonging stable over a life-course, or does every elective belonging decay into the accumulated kind — or vice versa?