Metropolitan Manoeuvers: A Case Study of Young People’s Everyday Strategies of Survival and Innovation in a Post-Crisis UK City.

The economic crisis of 2007 has played out unevenly across Europe.  The effects have been particularly pronounced in large cities with sizeable populations of young people and historically high levels of reliance on welfare services. Birmingham is one such city. This paper utilises ethnographic data gathered as part of an EU FP7 project CITISPYCE. It draws on interviews and observations carried out with young people from deprived neighbourhoods who narrate experiences of living and making their lives in environments of uneven and contradictory socio-economic development.

The research reveals how, on the one hand young people’s lives are severely limited by stigma attached to their neighbourhoods, ethnicities and ages; which act to mark and reinforce social inequalities in their lives. On the other hand, however, some young people enact strategies or ‘manoeuvres’ that help them navigate the effects of global, national and local forces, which reinforce inequalities in their lives. The paper will describe simultaneous experiences of prejudice  associated with living in deprived areas, alongside ‘prestige’ that young people also gain through associations with such areas, and how this becomes a key source of social capital in the absence of other forms.

The paper will also chart young people’s movements around the city and map the innovative use made of different spaces to network, meet and work with others while also describing the precariousness that also characterises such manoeuvres.

The paper offers an assessment of the contradictory character of young people’s lives as a hallmark of metropolitan life in post-crisis Europe.