The Ongoingness of Urban Displacement: Exploring the Temporal Complexities of Displaced Experiences in Salford, UK

This paper explicates the long arc of urban displacement, revealing the way people live with displacement over time. It draws on biographical interviews that explore long-term experiences of displacement in Salford (north-west England) which occurred in the 1960s-90s. Salford has undergone repeated waves of ‘slum’ clearance, demolition and urban development programmes over several decades. Such changes have radically transformed the city and resulted in many residents being displaced and rehoused in surrounding areas. A biographical attunement enables the analysis to tend to different temporal layers in people’s stories. Initial experiences of displacement entangle with other dimensions in people’s lives, that become layered with additional losses and experiences over time. These layerings are not only tied with personal experiences, but are also entangled with the lived experience of endless crescendos of urban restructuring in subsequent decades. In other words, it is the ongoing class injustices through repeat urban policy intervention, where areas are demolished and remade over and again, that amplify initial experiences of displacement. In line with calls to better elucidate the temporalities of displacement (Elliot-Cooper et al., 2019), capturing a longer timeframe of displaced experiences reveals displacement as a process that extends into the future, differently colouring and conditioning biographical experience. Multiple processes of displacement and redevelopment layer up in people’s lives and enmesh with personal complexities, keeping displacement an ongoing experience of injustice that permeates people’s present in the decades later.