Everyday life and local atmospheres in deindustrialising neighbourhoods

In the context of deindustrialisation, it is important to examine how this global multi-layer process affects everyday life and local atmospheres in former working-class neighbourhoods. It is no less important to understand how current residents of deindustrialising urban areas sense and imagine their places of residence. The article examines these issues with the help of the concept of structure of feeling focusing on a sense of attachment to place and spatial images visualised by working-class and middle-class residents living in two industrial neighbourhoods located in the cities of Moscow and Yekaterinburg, Russia. The research design of the project builds on multi-sited ethnography which combines the mainstream qualitative methods of interviewing and observation with the creative method of a drawing of a neighbourhood, also known as a mental mapping technique. The research has revealed that the Soviet industrial legacy informs an affective attachment to place of both working-class and longstanding middle-class residents. At the same time, Soviet socialist values co-exist (and sometimes conflict) with post-Soviet neoliberal values. These co-existence and conflicts of socialist and neoliberal structures shape the landscapes and local atmospheres in the neighbourhoods studied.