Time: 13.15-15.00
Online – Zoom
In Swedish
Displacing Diversity: How Social Mix Interventions are Legitimised, Experienced and Resisted in a Danish Neighbourhood.
Rebecka Söderberg, Department of Global Political Studies, Malmö University.
Abstract: This doctoral thesis explores residents’ experiences of and resistance to social mix interventions, as well as how these interventions are legitimised in policies. This is studied through an ethnographic approach to policies combined with ethnographic fieldwork in a neighbourhood targeted by social mix interventions. In its empirical scope, the thesis is limited to a Scandinavian context, highlighting the perspectives of residents in a Danish neighbourhood targeted by the so-called ghetto legislation and comparing Danish and Swedish policies.
Researching experiences of social mix interventions while they occur, this thesis adds new aspects to previous research, which is mainly concerned with whether social mix policies ‘work’. The analysis shows how social mix interventions have immediate, wide-reaching and unintended consequences, and highlights mundane and productive dimensions of processes of resistance.
The thesis can be downloaded here.
“Resetting” the Neighbourhood: Residents’ Resistance to Place Destruction in Gränby, Uppsala.
Åse Richard, Institute for Housing and Urban Research (IBF), Uppsala University.
Abstract: By following tenants who resist the destruction of their common yards in a post-renoviction neighbourhood of Uppsala (Sweden), this article examines how the local resistance by marginalized communities intersects with the effects of the financialization of housing. The article explores the concept of unhoming, as a violent, structural, and multi-scalar process that, in the name of urban renewal, destroys the places of marginalized communities in the capitalist city. For residents in a post-renoviction neighbourhood, the real-life experience of “creative destruction” entails navigating paradoxical and conflicting discourses, inflicting material, immaterial and emotional harm to the residents. The local resistance play out as a demand for housing justice, and as a forced balancing between patient dialogue and more confrontative action, in an increasingly authoritative context. Finally, the article suggests the use of a theoretical frame of place destruction in the analysis of contemporary urban struggles.
The article can be downloaded here.
Commentator: Jennie Gustafsson, Postdoc, Department of Urban Studies, Malmö University.
Chair: Martin Grander, Associate senior lecturer, Department of Urban Studies, Malmö University.