My previous research may be divided into three - though overlapping - areas: urban studies, youth research and sports sociology. Beside this, I have also written several text book articles and the like. However, it is only in the urban area that I have been active more permanently over the years.

Urban studies research
My dissertation, written together with Eva Sandstedt, Grannskap och stadsplanering. Om stat och byggande I efterkrigstidens Sverige was defened in 1981 (a second edition was published in 1993 by Arkiv under the new title Välfärdsstat och byggande. Om efterkrigstidens nya stadsmönster i Sverige.) Here we try to demonstrate how and why and with what everyday life consequences a new spatial pattern - much in line with modernist town planning principles - was to dominate Swedish cities at least from the 1960's. In doing this, we dissolve the paradox that a planning form that once was seen as the means to promote local Gemeinschaft later came to be associated with its opposite. In doing this we apply - and spatialise - Habermas theory of the public sphere and its transformation, while empirically/historically following a net of interacting, and stately coordinated, forces, producing this new spatial pattern. This once controversial thesis now has become something of a standard reference on the post WWII Swedish welfare state.
After completing the dissertation, I managed to get a research grant from HSFR to investigate the Swedish city before this transformation. However, this time focus was placed on another scale level. Some central blocks in the huge working-class quarter of Södermalm in Stockholm were the spatial and temporal context could be supposed to favour a popular urban culture were selected. Thus, my urban sociology had to be also historical sociology, making use of a lot of archive materials besides doing some oral history research. This resulted in some articles, among them 'Den röda hästskon. Stockholms sociala koordinater 1935' (1987) where I lay out the social geography of Stockholm at that time and particularly the extension and nature of the Red Belt, or Horse Shoe, in Stockholm. The main results however are published in two monographs. The first of them, Centrala Katarina mellan depression och världskrig. Bebyggelse struktur och historia (1987, 263pp) deals exclusively with the twenty Söder blocks, their history and spatial patterns. The second, Den folkliga staden. Söderkvarter i Stockholm mellan krigen (1992, 476 pp) takes a broader perspective on urban popular culture. After carefully defining this concept, it is shown that its presuppositions were to be found at that time in this place: a dense inner city populated mainly by wage labourers. After showing this, the life of, and between, these blocks are reconstructed from early morning till late at night. It is also reconstructed from the point of view of people that lived there then through their life histories. Finally, this urban popular culture is characterised in its opposition to, and deviance from the norms of, the authorities and the establishment.
If this work very much implied a spatialisation, and temporalisation, of social theory, later I have tried also to incorporate concepts and perspectives from the cultural turn into urban research. Thus, place became an important subject matter, both in 'City narratives: The peculiarities of the Stockholm South Side' (1997) about the production and construction of Södermalm's place identity, and in an analysis of the sluggish proposal for a thorough rebuilding of Stockholm's most central square, Sergels torg, published as 'A weired politics of place' (2002). In the latter work, an analysis at three different scale levels were necessary in explaining this most uncommon politics of place. In another article I analyse lust and longing in relation to the Swedish city (1994), and in 'Mellan lust och leda' (1996) I explore the possibilities for, if not lust, yet pleasure, in commuting - a phenomenon normally recognised for its tediousness.
Another of my research interests, beginning with my 1982 article 'Gatans disciplinering' (Disciplining the street), concerns the control of micro space, a central theme also in Den folkliga staden. I have taken this research further in a string of articles. In 'Staden och våldet' (1997) I criticise how public urban violence has been understood within Swedish criminology, overlooking the nature of urban space, for example its liminal qualities. In 'Urban order and the preventive restructuring of space' (2001) I critically analyse the effects of private border controls on (the remaining) public space. 'Det offentliga rummet: renässans eller förfall?' (2000) takes a broader grip on these questions.
A historical synthesis of housing policy in Sweden, where I stress the importance of its formation in the 1940's and its strange persistence after the critique of the so called Million Program is developed in 'Der Bau des Folkhems. Wohnungsbaupolitik in Schweden 1940-1980' (1996)
I have also tried to bring the issue of recognition into the debate over residential segregation. In 'Problemet segreagtion' (2001) I argue that the segregation problem is due to disrespect. Thus, segregation is not a problem because it is a threat, but because it is unjust.

Sport and youth research
In a specific sense, my involvement in sport and in youth research comes out of the work with Den folkliga staden. First of all, this drew me into a group of youth researchers interested in youth and modernity in the Swedish 1930's. Within the group, I had to chose a research subject of my own, namely sport. We managed to get a research grant from HSFR/FRN, which resulted in the book Från flygdröm till swingscen (1998), written to be read as one book by myself together with Ulf Bõethius, Magdalena Czaplicka, P-O Qvist and Olle Sjögren. My contribution is first of all an analysis of youth and sport within the ambivalences of modernity, foregrounding class and gender differences through an analysis of different sports. Besides that I also contributed to our mutually written introduction, setting our different pieces in one historical and theoretical perspective. In 'The emergence of a modern youth culture: The Swedish 1930's' (2002), I try to synthesise our book, bringing it to a conclusion, through a comparative analysis of two dimensions of modernity - the modernity and the boundary dimensions - that were differently articulated for the phenomena we set out to understand: boys' aviation literature, girls' literature, sport, Swedish film respectively U.S. film. Within the project, I also wrote a general, theoretical, article, 'Gren och stil eller sport som ungdomskultur' (1994), arguing strong affinities between sport and youth culture, and a historical one, 'Sporten, ungdomen och folkhemmets födelse' (1994), where I stress the importance of recognising the difference between sport and Swedish gymnastics in understanding sport as youth culture in the 1930's.
Also coming out of my knowledge of, and interest in, Söder and its history is an analysis of its most famous sports club, Hammarby IF. Together with Peter Billing and Tomas Peterson, I have written a study comparing Hammarby with its opposite within Swedish soccer, that is Malmö FF. In the book Vem vinner i längden? (1999) we trace the history of both clubs (their football sections), focusing particularly upon how they handled two decisive historical ruptures, the dismantling of the amateur rules in 1967, and the coming of the spectacle in the 1990's.