Reclaiming Cities As Spaces of Middle Class Parenthood

For nearly a century families have been out-migrating to suburbs and peri-urban areas. In this book, Johanna Lilius conceptualizes the relatively recent phenomenon of families choosing to live in the inner city. Drawing on a range of qualitative data, the book offers a holistic approach to simultaneously understanding changes within parenting practices and changes connected to city development. The book explains not only why families choose to stay in the inner city and how they use the city in their everyday lives, but also how families change the landscape of contemporary cities, and how the family is, and has been, perceived in urban planning and policy-making. The Nordic perspective provided by Lilius makes this book an important contribution in helping understand inner city change outside the Anglo-American context, and will appeal to an international audience.

Johanna Lilius is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Architecture, Aalto University, Finland, who has explored the phenomenon of families returning to inner cities for more than ten years. She has also researched urban and suburban regeneration, multi-locality, single household dwelling, street level consumption, sense of community in planning and everyday life, and strategic urban planning in the Nordic context.