Social Transformation and Urban Regeneration: Well-Being and Women's Marginalization in Community Contexts

The concept of well-being is ambiguous and multifaceted, proving difficult to conceptualize and measure, and being variously viewed as happiness, satisfaction, life fulfilment, and engage-ment. Despite conceptual confusions, well-being is integral to the UK Happiness Agenda, an agenda that is paralleled across Canada. Improving health and well-being has formed a central tenet of UK urban regeneration policy, whereby enhancing well-being through improvements to the environment, housing, and community is highlighted. Yet social transformations in health and well-being are difficult to achieve, particularly through urban renewal in areas of social disadvantage. This is problematic for women living at the margins of society, particularly at the intersections of gender, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity. The research presented here explores the well-being consequences of urban regeneration for women living in disadvantaged community circumstances, asking: In what ways can urban regeneration praxis transform the social and personal well-being of marginalized women in community contexts? An intersec-tional lens is applied, with the focus on three mid-life women of different ethnic origins, residency periods, and situations of social and financial disadvantage. Using a participatory ap-proach, interviews, video diaries, and photo-voice methods were used to capture data, enabling the generation of rich, participant-led, nuanced information. Findings highlight how urban regeneration challenged the women’s sense of home and community. The intricacies, routines, and simple pleasures of everyday life grounded the women as members of their communities, reaffirming their identities and local social value. Faced with the power imbalances and pro-fessional elitism inherent in the regeneration, the women resisted social and environmental transformations that reduced their sense of personal and social well-being, and re-appropriated those places in their communities for themselves and their families. The research concludes that well-being is embedded in women’s experiences of home and community and is imposed on by the socio-structural progress of regeneration and structured through the lens of time and place. Lessons learned from this UK research are considered within the Canadian policy context.