Living in commodified history

What is it about?

This paper examines how residents of neotraditional neighbourhoods in the Netherlands socially construct a 'classed' place-identity and what role the historicised architecture plays within that process. Given that place-identity is constructed through social and cultural practices, the paper argues that residents' consumption of historicised environment is bound up with drawing symbolic boundaries which have been explored here by analysing residents’ narratives. Three prominent types of narratives were found: (1) residents' locational choice, (2) their aesthetic judgement of the residential environment and (3) the way they use it. Through these layered narratives, all interviewees appear to use historicised aesthetics to classify themselves as part of a valued social category. However, the way of boundary drawing took several forms, based either on fostering moral judgements of social behaviour accompanied by sophisticated efforts to keep neighbourhoods' historicised image unchanged, or by conducting cultural practices shared with fellow residents by which ' the other' living outside the neighbourhood is 'bracket out' symbolically and socially.

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