Emplacing Some, Displacing Others: Ethnic Minority Enterprises as Critical Urban Infrastructure in Lodge Lane, Liverpool

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research on Lodge Lane, the main commercial street within Toxteth (Liverpool), this paper reveals how fundamental ethnic minority enterprises (EMEs) have been to the regeneration of this marginalized area due to public disinvestment. Acting as critical infrastructure, they have transformed the materiality of the locale, and by extension, they have afforded new kinds of encounter and convivialities. Ultimately, EMEs appear to have a critical emplacing and displacing power, which involves urban inhabitants in a differential way over time, depending on their positionality toward the material and discursive aspects of place.