Place and belonging: what can we learn from Claremont Court Housing Scheme?

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This project engages with a key area of public concern: sense of belonging. The proposed research asks how place influences belonging to place and community. This question, which brings together three researchers from different disciplines (Architecture, Sociology and Social Work) and a collective of residents, is the basis of a unique cross-disciplinary approach that studies both physical and lived space, using as a case study Claremont Court housing scheme (Edinburgh). Claremont Court is a large post-war mixed development housing scheme, which included place-making as one of its founding principles. Over time and with significant societal changes and shifts in housing policy, the composition of the scheme has changed. It is therefore an apposite site for uncovering connections between place and belonging.The research is built on two assumptions: first, it understands place (lived space) as the physical space together with the spatial atmosphere (those phenomena or lived aspects that give meaning to it). Second, it takes dwelling and belonging as interchangeable. Our assumption is that the process of place-making leads to belonging. The proposed research identifies three interlinked strands that frame the underlying research question: space, atmosphere and belonging. These research strands require a five-stage new cross-disciplinary methodology that combines methods and evaluation processes from architectural theory with those of the social sciences. The originality of this research is the use of cross-disciplinary research in a deductive approach to confirm or not an architectural theory of place-making.A phenomenological approach (i.e., one which studies human experience) has been used already to explore people's experience of place and how architecture can be a vehicle for place making. However, the gap between the conceptual approach of architectural theory and the study of lived space has still to be bridged.