Collective capital and local resilience of residents of suburbs;Ethnography of Azizi town residents of Qods city

In the past few decades, the rapid growth of internal migration in the country has caused the demographic composition of the cities to be disrupted and the population of suburbs to increase every day, and the consequence of this issue in its pathological form has been overpopulation, the formation of cultural conflicts in the new way of life, unemployment, and various social problems. Regardless of the pathologic approach to the development of suburbs, the important issue is how these communities can survive despite economic, social, and cultural tensions and problems and what are the mechanisms that contribute to the resilience of such communities? This study aims to investigate the mechanisms and strategies used by the residents of suburbs in order to analyze the consumption patterns of families living in Azizi town of Quds city.

  The present study uses ethnographic techniques such as participant observation and interviews to gather information. The time spent in the field to gather the data was 18 months, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the presence in the field has not been continuous. During this period, thirty-two families living in Azizi town along with owners of local enterprises were interviewed. The criterion for continuation of these interviews was theoretical saturation. During these interviews, sensitive theoretical concepts such as the context of individual actions, resilience, and local rationality was used and by focusing on consumption and how daily needs are met, the consumption patterns of families were studied. The extracted texts from the interviews were coded using thematic analysis.

The results show that given the economic and cultural conditions of the field of study, the management of the economic consumption pattern in the studied families has been influenced by social components such as social network support in various ways, intelligence in choosing the type of store or purchasing methods, purchasing based on acquaintance, roaming for optimal purchase, and relying on installment and credit purchases. All of these components indicate that a particular form of local rationality based on collective resources and capital prevails in the studied community, which does not necessarily have a particular form of rationality in the face of instrumental rationality, and does not provide a theoretical perspective for understanding and interpreting the decision-making and mechanisms of economic actions of individuals in the studied community. The residents have intelligent behavior in life due to their daily environmental limitations and use various strategies to meet their needs. It was concluded that local resilience in such communities is the result of collective resources and capital. This means that the residents of these communities’ benefit from available resources, especially social networks and collective capital, to meet their needs. It seems that the existence and use of such strategies help maintain the informal settlement areas, while attraction of such areas will increase the flow of migrations to the suburbs, and this can lead to the emergence of new issues.