In this final chapter, we briefly reflect upon some of the themes that have emerged through our data. It will be apparent that this research constitutes a further contribution to the necessary task of engaging with the unique physical and social infrastructure of a multi-ethnic urban space, and with the very distinctive histories and embedded discourses that animate people’s understandings of their life there. The reality that then emerges stands in stark contrast to the distorting, broad-brush declamations about inner-city ghettos. It challenges a reduction of urban areas to a detailed demographic mapping of the population, and to the physical characteristics of the area. The discussion of the streetscape of Manningham in Chapters Two and Three provided a clear insight into the inherent social construction of the meanings of the physical characteristics of an area. Manningham clearly exists within a multiply nuanced web of histories that are known and owned by specific constituencies of interest and identity within, and beyond, the area.

The account we have offered has pragmatically drawn upon the very extensive social-psychological literature that has widened and deepened our understanding of the nature and operation of social identities. It is a clear theme within this data that space, place and identity are woven together in a very particular flux. The ready availability of heavily over-rehearsed collective identities recurs as a marked feature of the manner in which individuals make sense of their lives in Manningham through the lens of specific collective identities. Identities grounded in ethnicity, gender, class, faith or age do not provide rigid frameworks through which our residents must inexorably experience their everyday interactions. However, they do exist as an available repertoire of means of categorising self and others, which when made salient in a specific context, can radically change the social significance of the interaction, and its long-term implications. The shift from an interpersonal to an inter-group reading of a situation is a social-psychological dynamic that feeds off and reinforces, in the momentary interactions on the street, the polarised depictions of inter-group conflict that are so evident in the accounts of inner-city urban areas in the media and in academe. Where these encounters, and their construal in inter-group terms, become regularised in the local patterns of routine interaction, then we have a situation in which stereotypes become not only ossified, but also seemingly legitimated.