Page - 168 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 3/2017

168 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 3 2017Emanuelle Lenel | Open neighbourhood, closed neighbourhood in the relationships to the neighbourhood, usually neglected in the «classical» studies of the regenerated neighbourhoods in terms of gentrification. Indeed, the commented itineraries gave access to dimensions of the mobility experience when it comes to the body. While the discur- sive data collected during interviews allowed to report the embodied experience «to the social and historical conditions of perception» (Chadoin, 2010), i.e. to situate this experience and the perceived neighbourhood within a social system in order to underline the collective dimension of the emerging atmospheres. So the paper argues that the atmosphere of openness or closeness emerging in these neighbourhoods is linked to an unequal capital of mobility. In the Heyvaert neighbourhoud, the emerging atmosphere for the old owners belonging to the Moroccan immigration is characterised by oppression. They live in the old houses close to the car trade activities established in the neighbourhood since the 1990s, and they strongly experience its pollutions (Lenel, 2015) as an invasion in their privacy. Furthermore they do not have the economic means (no prospect of residential mobility) to escape from this «lost neigh- bourhood». They so suffer these pollutions as well as the proximity with other immigrants more precarious than them. Conversely, the emerging atmosphere for the new owners is characterised by the feeling to live in a neighbourhood connected to the oustide: this metropolitan population live in a new building facing the canal at one end of the neighbourhood, where these pollutions are less perceived and where they can more easily access their activities, scattered in the city. The Vieux Molenbeek is a neighbourhood in transition, combining strong traces of its flo- riscent industrial past, material degradation and its future as a part of the expanded city center. According to what is seized of these promises of future, reminiscences of the past or hesitati- ons of the present, the emerging atmospheres for old or new owners are not contemporary to each other. For the old owners also belonging to the Moroccan immigration, installed in the neighbourhood sometimes for several decades, the emerging atmosphere is the one of a «beau- tiful village» getting lost, reminiscent of their social success as immigrated workers. But this village is limited to the old degraded spaces marked by a narrow atmosphere, where traveling is uncomfortable. While the atmosphere commented by the new owners, living in the renovated spaces of the neighbourhood, is the one of a «small theater of life» (Bidou, 1984), a convivial and cosmopolitan urban landscape to which they do not really participate. This strong atmosphere but that does not capture them allows them to cross the neighbourhood to get the city center without feeling caught in its density and presencies (noise, dirt, individuals). Finally, these analyses support an hypothesis: the «felt mobility» is an unequally distributed resource for the management of proximity to the other in the targeted neighbourhoods that are urbanistically and demographically dense. The «felt mobility» for old and new owners has indeed very contrasted effects on the modes of attention and the affects to the other, the distur- bing one in particular that is more or less easily held at a «good distance». The feelings of being able to be elsewhere that there give the new owners the necessary game so as not to be absorbed in a time-space of constrained copresence, and allows to update «intellectualist» dispositions to tolerance (Simmel, 2004[1993]). While the old owners more involved in the thickness (vécu épais) of «their» neighbourhood find fewer opportunities to distance the disturbing one, and feel more negative affects to him. The paper questions the contribution of urban revitalisation policy in this respect.