Belonging: Seeing Ourselves in the Future

by Will Brown – 27/06/2023

As a component of the recent Academy of Urbanism Congress, a panel was convened at the William Harvey lecture theatre within the Cambridge University Clinical School on the Addenbrookes site. Whilst the speakers (one of whom was this project’s David Skinner) spoke about the development of the Biomedical Campus, the history and development of Royal Papworth, the realities of community engagement and the difficulties within the planning process, during the Q&A session, an interesting discussion coalesced around a particular topic; that of belonging. 

Belonging is one of those terms which is a somewhat fuzzy, ill-defined ideal which means different things to different people and groups. According to the Cambridge University Dictionary, belonging is “a feeling of being happy or comfortable as part of a particular group and having a good relationship with the other members of the group because they welcome you and accept you”. Whilst this definition summarises the overriding elements of belonging, it is built atop a number of concepts which are difficult to pin down. Depending upon which ‘group’ you are intending to become a part of, the notions of what a ‘good relationship’ is, or what constitutes ‘comfort’, ‘happiness’, ‘acceptance’ or what being ‘welcome’ is, will differ to those of not only different groups, but to different individuals within them.  

An important component of people’s belonging is their relation to place. A way of thinking about belonging can be found in the work of French urban sociologist Michel de Certeau. According to de Certeau, for an individual to successfully relate with others within a new or changing environment, requires skills of ‘enunciation’. For de Certeau enunciation relates to four elements; ‘realising, appropriating, being inscribed in relations and being situated in time’. 

De Certeau draws upon an example of a migrant who has recently moved to Paris, where initially the new arrival, in an unfamiliar setting, will have to interpret and realise the usage of language (by speaking it) and space (by moving through it) within their new context. This leads to an appropriation of the language/use of space, as they become increasingly familiar and more comfortable with using it. With an appropriated but not fully formed understanding of their surroundings, the individual will then form relations with others within that environment by utilising the recently appropriated language. Whilst this may be an overly simplistic and somewhat reductionist means of viewing belonging, it forms a useful structure in considering how people encounter new or emerging entities and the process of forging a connection to them. 

Amongst urbanists, town planners and sociologists, de Certeau is most renowned for his ideas around ‘walking in the city’, which he considers, in part, to be a physical manifestation of his enunciation model. De Certeau provides a perspective of the walker as an ‘everyday practitioner’ who follows the “thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read”. This ‘urban text’ is made up of “individual ‘poems in which each body is an element signed by many others” (ibid). In short, the urban text forms the “practices organising a bustling city”, produced by a myriad of walking practitioners and “is to the urban system what the speech act is to language”. The sum of different people’s use of space through walking, in-turn produces the spatial reality of that city.

Going for a walk, or as de Certeau would say ‘appropriating the topographical system’

For de Certeau the act of walking is the ‘process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on language)’ and is a ‘spatial acting out of place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language)’. Walking is a form of enunciation, when we enter into a new space we interpret and realise the space we are in through our experience of it, we then appropriate how others use that space and whilst doing so, inscribe relations with others within it – be they open and intimate or detached and isolating. 

Now, the eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed I have only spoken about three of the four elements of de Certeau’s enunciation model, eschewing the fact that this process is ‘situated in time’. This, I will argue, is an essential property to consider when conceiving of how people belong to emerging spaces and the social constraints which arise with, and within, them. De Certeau identifies throughout the practice of enunciation the ‘establishment of a present through the act of the ‘I’ [and therefore] the organisation of a temporality (the present creates a before and after) and the existence of a ‘now’. 

The observation that enunciation, as understood by de Certeau, is inherently temporal, is supported by the observations of Tovi Fenster, geographer at Tel Aviv University, who notes that:

…belonging and attachment are built [on] the base of accumulated knowledge, memory, and intimate corporal experiences of everyday walking. A sense of belonging changes with time as these everyday experiences grow and their effects accumulate

This quote highlights one temporal element of belonging to a space, that of repetition, of sustained and repeated use of a space, grounded in the notion that the more times we ‘enunciate’ within a particular space, the more comfortable we will be within it. 

However, I want to take the notion of ‘temporality’ and space further beyond that of repeated spatial practice and experience. According to the sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod, cities are ‘a process, not a product’; they exist in a constant state of change. Cambridge, in particular the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, is a clear example of this. How we belong to a space relates to not just how a space is experienced in the present, but also to our perspective on how it existed in the past and how it could exist in the future. 

To apply this notion of ‘temporal belonging’ to the development and rapid growth of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, let’s consider a recent discussion [2023] at the Queen Edith’s Community Forum and the concern of ‘creeping growth’ turning villages into suburbs. The expansion of not only the campus, but also the city as a whole, represents something of an existential ‘threat’ to a number of nearby villages adjacent to Cambridge, with the prospect of them being subsumed into the ‘sprawl’ of the ever-growing city. To belong to these places is to belong to a space which, over time, is potentially becoming more and more incorporated into the urban fabric of Cambridge. 

Now, of course, what some may see as a ‘threat’, some may see as an ‘opportunity’ or something to be welcomed. To this end, a key difference between these perspectives revolves around the notion of perceived belonging within that imagined future. Could a resident of 30 or so years see themselves ‘belonging’ to a suburban future? Could they feel ‘comfortable’ or ‘welcome’ in that space, could they realise the changes within it, appropriate and assimilate to them and inscribe new and modified social relations as a result? If the answer is yes, then in a sense, the future is bright and at present, the space is one to belong within. However, if the answer is no and the future is beset by potential threats and a loss of a distinct identity, then this will alter the sense of belonging in the present; one will not be belonging to a village as it is now, per se, but rather a potential future suburb. 

Ultimately, to consider this in relation to the discussion at the Academy of Urbanism, when considering belonging to the emerging spaces of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus and the communities surrounding it, I would argue that it is insufficient to solely consider how people would belong to it in the here and now, focusing entirely on the present. We need a temporal perspective, one which takes into account how people perceive themselves belonging in the ‘future’ of that space, with a consideration of how that impacts the ‘present’, is required. 

This is especially the case in relation to the campus, where, depending on your perspective, the promise and benefit of its expansion is very much focused upon the future; especially when considering the desire to turn it into a ‘vibrant new city quarter’. Therefore, the question is not who will belong to this new space when it is eventually built, but who could see themselves belonging to it in the future and, ultimately, who belongs to the development of the campus now?