Pinkster and Loomans propose urban belonging as place-based affect, a process emerging through everyday encounters with the social and material city rather than a stable feeling of being at home. The iconic idea is that belonging can intensify, fracture, detach or turn into rejection as urban conditions change. Their empirical focus on Amsterdam during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic allows belonging to appear as differentiated affect: contentment, anxious detachment, disenchantment, alienation and refusal. The theoretical contribution is to shift belonging from identity language to affective geography, showing how inequalities are lived through encounters with domestic space, public space, neighbourhood atmosphere and disrupted routine. Methodologically, the work reads qualitative experience as relational urban evidence, connecting affect to everyday practice. Its conceptual operation is affective differentiation: the same city produces unequal emotional capacities across residents. It bridges urban geography, affect theory, pandemic urbanism and inequality studies by making belonging a diagnostic category of urban life.
