The phrase ‘it's not where you live, it's how you live’, was said to me on a number of occasions by different people in the Bridgetown Estate while I was doing this research project. It was usually women who used the phrase. When I first heard it, I took it as a simple desire for respect. Then I heard it a few more times and began thinking about it a bit more. It seemed to say that one can somehow get past or transcend the conditions of life that one faces and live an honourable and decent life by sheer force of will and practice. When residents used this phrase, they were usually talking about the present. How you live was referring to how you live now in the particular and the present, but it was also a more eternal or universal how you live. It is perhaps a myth, a necessary story that people tell themselves to make life bearable and to stop them from falling into the abyss. If I were to write what I thought it meant it would read something like this: I am an honourable decent person as good as or the same as anyone else. So it doesn't matter where I live. It's how I live that really matters. There is in the phrase a consciousness of what the big Other will say or think about me. A desire for respectability. But it is more than that. Much more. Over the course of researching and writing this book I came to understand that this question of how to live is perhaps the most fundamental of all for the people who live on the Bridgetown Estate, for the fieldwork showed clearly that this willto-respect and the desire for a good life was confronted with harsh realities that resulted in significant struggles. The phrase brings to the surface the ontological question of the nature of being as it is made through time, but it also raises questions about unrealised possibilities of what ought to be or what could be. This dialectical tension (and enormous abyss) between past and present conditions and future possibilities is at the heart of this book.

There are good things in the present lives of public housing tenants. There are practices of love and care, of nurturing, sharing and solidarity.