Tangential attachments: Towards a more nuanced understanding of the impacts of cultural urban regeneration on local identities

This article offers the concept of tangential attachments as a way to interpret the meaning of urban regeneration for local residents. This contribution to the critical study of cultural regeneration allows us to consider the multiple ways in which urban transformation can impact on local identities and attachments to place. It recognises the sometimes fleeting and at-arms-length connections residents can have to places of urban regeneration, and thereby positions the experience of urban regeneration as one part of complex, processual relationships between people and place. The article extends literatures which critique the social and cultural impacts of regeneration, and offers a more nuanced understanding of how people engage with regenerated urban environments. Principally, it offers a framework that goes beyond a binary presented by some in the literature between the enhancing and undermining of attachments. The article does this by drawing on phenomenogical perspectives of place and the concepts of memory and affect. The empirical work presented in the article demonstrates the tangential nature of attachments to urban regeneration, and is comprised of original in-depth research interviews with residents of a local community in Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK.