This section deals with the issue of identity, understood as a social construct and a constant process of redefinition. It is an understanding that rings particularly true in Yeoville, both internally (for its residents) and externally (for outsiders): Yeoville the poverty-stricken slum, the neighbourhood inhabited by foreign nationals, the hotbed of criminality, the old bohemian neighbourhood ‘fallen from grace’, and so on are all powerful stigmas that have become attached to its identity since the political transition. But Yeoville is also an important spatial resource and a place of strong attachment for its residents, and one of the difficulties we had as researchers was navigating the fine line between romanticised depictions of Yeoville and the more ingrained narrative of decline, for both are intertwined in current as well as in former residents’ perceptions of the neighbourhood. Despite these difficulties, all the authors in this section were keenly aware of the necessity to provide alternative narratives for Yeoville. Doing so called for sensitivity to the various and sometimes contradictory meanings the narratives hold, but it seemed a necessary step towards the articulation of a positive vision for the neighbourhood, through a capacity to formulate a shared future. The methodological imperative of letting Yeovillites tell their own stories informed this particular goal and is represented in the vignettes of this section. Most of the research developed in this section did not directly inform policy or community action: our partners, as Sophie Didier and Naomi Roux explain in chapter 11, had identified more urgent priorities dealing with housing issues and trading in particular. Yet the various Studio workshops and activities addressing the issue of the identity of the neighbourhood were also significant to the residents who participated in them. It was important to acknowledge the diversity of perceptions and hopes they individually held with regard to the neighbourhood. It was also important to let these stories be heard more broadly, in public exhibitions and events, as a deterrent against caricature: the process of defining a collective Yeoville identity is necessarily complex, but it is also hotly contested.

Indeed, underlying the inherent fragmentation of individual representations of the neighbourhood is the basic idea that there is no obviously fixed, collective Yeoville identity and that the articulation of a particular one always reveals a political purpose, as Claire Benit-Gbaffou and Eulenda Mkwanazi underline in chapter 8.