ABSTRACT

If, as the anthropologist Donna Birdwell-Pheasant contends, ‘place’ is a location that is named and holds the ‘symbolic and imaginary investments of the population’, then all towns and cities are born of emotion. 1 The process of identifying a location by a particular appellation, of determining its borders and boundaries and then, and perhaps most importantly, in making decisions about who can live, work, hold civic rights and exercise duties, and call themselves ‘of the town’, requires human beings to make particular emotional investments in physical and imaginary space. Once such decisions are made, the towns and cities people make are deeply implicated in shaping the emotional lives of their inhabitants and those that move through them. Such shaping is, of course, like so much of life, informed not just by physical environment but also by the characteristics held and attributed to the individual being produced through space – whether they are male or female, rich or poor, in-dweller or migrant, black or white, gay or straight, adult or child. This Part 5 of the handbook seeks to interrogate what difference emotion makes to a gendered history of urban experience. Across six chapters, authors explore the different ways that emotions can be theorised and applied to urban histories and, through that theorisation, enable us to understand the important role that emotions have played and continue to play in human experience.