Sense of Place as Spatial Control: Austerity and Place Processes Among Young People in Ballymun, Dublin

After the 2008 financial crisis, fiscal austerity policies have transformed the material and affective qualities of urban space. The material disruptions of austerity provide an opportunity to investigate the relationships between physical and social space. This chapter explores the impacts of austerity on sense of place for a group particularly affected by crisis and austerity, disadvantaged urban youth. Interviews with young adults from Ballymun, one of Dublin’s most deprived neighbourhoods, are analysed to understand the affective transformations of place under austerity. The six place processes, developed by Seamon (Life Takes Place: Phenomenology, Lifeworlds, and Place Making, Routledge, New York, 2018), are mobilised to illuminate the impact of austerity on the relations between people-in-place, the environmental ensemble, and common presence. Austerity negatively affected the formation of a sense of place among young adults. As their spatial neighbourhood identity remained strong, austerity’s negative effects on sense of place followed from an experienced loss of control over the spaces of everyday life.