Belongingness: How neighbourhood gets under the skin

Abstract

A challenge facing researchers is to understand how neighbourhood ‘gets under the skin’, influencing the health and wellbeing of those who live there. There is mixed evidence, and increasingly sophisticated theoretical explanations, concerning the health effects of neighbourhood characteristics. However, there is an empirical gap created by the emphasis on neighbourhood characteristics or experiences at a single point in time, with comparatively little attention given to the biographical accumulation of experiences in the varying residential contexts encountered throughout the lifecourse. My research explored if and how experiences of neighbourhood are carried forward as people move from place to place; and if and how those experiences influence everyday habits that enable or undermine personal health and wellbeing. Through a life-story narrative inquiry, including structural analysis and both within-case and cross-case thematic analyses, the recollections and reflections of sixteen women living in Wellington, New Zealand, were explored to see how childhood experiences inform present-day perceptions, preferences, and practices towards their residential area and their attentiveness to health and wellbeing through active living and food. Health and wellbeing were found to be enabled by the childhood experience of a sense of neighbourhood belonging. Participants’ narratively reconstructed recollections suggest that their childhood experiences of neighbourhood belonging came about through an everyday practice of unsupervised, unstructured play with nearby peers in public and private neighbourhood spaces. Their narratives suggest such spaces to be ‘third places’ of the children’s making, with as much relevance to their young lives as is claimed of third places in the lives of adults. A childhood engagement with third places of the local children’s making is shown to be related to the development and embodiment of knowledge about trustworthiness, resulting in an ability to form mutually beneficial social relations with children living nearby. As adults, participants who had experienced a sense of neighbourhood belonging in childhood consciously worked toward developing neighbourly reciprocal social relations in adulthood, in the expectation of convivial camaraderie that sometimes extended to practical support. The study suggests that belonging to such informal social networks is positively associated with everyday practices of self-care that benefit health and wellbeing. My research suggests the third places of childhood to be an important mechanism for the embodiment of neighbourhood that has hitherto been overlooked in the quest to understand how place gets under the skin, having enduring implications for health and wellbeing across the lifecourse.