Living in Disadvantaged Neighborhoods: Experiential Narratives of Residents Facing Daily, Economic, Environmental, and Social Challenges

Being both a driver and a manifestation of the current ecological, climate, and social crises, urban sustainability has become a major contemporary issue. Rather than framing the challenges that populations are confronted to as external factors, especially in deprived and segregated neighborhoods, we collected narratives about their experience of their living environments. Our work assumed an innovative interdisciplinary perspective in response to the complex interconnexions of the issues at stake. We aimed to highlight the significance of a situated perspective and an experience-based approach to fully embrace the idea of a research engaged with and for the communities, especially those suffering from marginalization and social deprivation. Our empirical results, rooted in expressions of place attachment (or not), in four disadvantaged neighborhoods in France, are presented in the form of a heuristic device, a non-normative framework that iteratively produced a representation with six dimensions that we called feelings. Together, they can be used to explore the manifestations of well-being, through place attachment related to one’s living environment, in a relational and open way, as people make sense of their place and possibly engage in its defense. We suggest further attention should be directed to concepts such as agency, freedom, and social recognition, as major conditions of the possibility of well-being or leading a good life. These dimensions could be major targets for policies trying to respond to the current sustainability challenges, such as social and environmental justice in the face of an unequal and changing world.