My current research concerns mainly four different topics.
1. Who gets the right to the city? Governance, resistance and conflict in public space
The purpose of this project, financed by VR (2006-2008), conducted in cooperation with Dr. Catharina Thörn, Centrum för kulturstudier, Göteborg University, and Dr. Nils Hertting at IBF, is to analyse the accessibility of public space through a comparative study of the governance of the Central Business Districts in Göteborg and Stockholm. Accesibility is crucial for the CBD, particularly for its commercial parts; accessibilty, however, also implies potential problems of different kinds. A central question in this project, motivating is comparative approach, is the role of spatial design and control in the governance of public space and the conflicts and critical accidents emanating from the regulation of the accessibility of the city. To get a better understanding of the conditions for the governance of the CBD, our intention is to analyse different critical situations where the question of accessibility is put on its head. What does it mean that a space is public, for whom is it public? How is the governance patterned that regulates what can be present, visible and coming together in the public space of the CBD? This, in its turn, raises further questions about the right to the city, citizenship and democracy.
Our ambition is also to develop a new theoretical frame, combining constructivism and rationalism, for a deeper understanding of the governance of the accessibility of public space. This presupposes combining theoretical perspectives from political science and sociology and working with the perspectives of several different actors.
2. The politics of place
In what has become a book project, based on several published articles, I am trying to make a contribution to the study of the politics of place. Empirically, this study is about the Stockholm CBD. My focus is particularly upon two places here, the squares Sergels torg and Stureplan. Nowadays, it is easy, perhaps to easy, to construct these two places through a series of binary oppositions. While Sergels torg over the years have acquired a bad reputation, epitomizing the centre of the Stockholm drug traffic, Stureplan has become the centre of the Stockholm glamour zone, at least since the opening of the Stureplan shopping arcade in 1989, followed by a swarm of exclusive night clubs. While Sergels torg is being perceived as a dangerous place, the home of alien heroinists, Stureplan is, despite its glamourous image, a place of violence and cocaine. What kind of power relations and politics of place help produce these kinds of asymmetries?
To answer these questions I am looking for an answer that presupposes the combination of what has happened on several scale levels, including not only the squares and the CBD as such, but also higher ones, as the regional and the national levels. I also try to conceptualise this politics of place as a play between stigma and charisma.
3. Gentrification: a comparative study of Ottensen, Hamburg and Södermalm, Stockholm – 1965 to the present
Ottensen in Hamburg and Södermalm in Stockholm both are former working class areas. Both areas have been gentrified since the 1960’s and particularly since the late 1980’s, though this process seems to have penetrated Södermalm more thoroughly. Given its former place image, a peculiar amalgamation of working class radicalism and popular culture, one important question is how Södermalm’s place image is being renegotiated by gentrification. In Ottensen, the new social movements were instrumental in turning Ottensen into alternativer Stadtteil in the 1970’s and early 1980’s through a succesful reuse of vacated factory space – a place image it still has.
Using a broader gentrification perspective – identifying not only the scope and tempo of the core gentrification process of upgrading the housing stock and its population and the conversion of tenements into owner occupiers/cooperatives but also processes of a more cultural kind – I go into questions about the role of the new socical movements in gentrification, the significance of the reuse of factory space, and questions of the making of place identities. Some answers to these questions have been published, but the work is not finished yet.
4. A longitudinal study of Swedish youth football
This research is based upon the project De avgörande åren (The critical years) funded by the former Council for Social Research, a project initiated by Tomas Peterson, Per Nilsson and me. Data was collected for three successive seasons in 42 boys’ and girls’ teams, from all over the country, from elite teams and more ordinary ones, beginning at the age of 13 (1997-1999). Thus a unique panel data base was created. We also have comparable data of all girls and boys participating at the elite gatherings in Halmstad in 1999.
Tomas Peterson and I here have a series of articles in preparation for publication on the making of gender differences focussing upon resistance and overconformity among the girls, on the role that ethnicity plays for the boys’ continued football involvement, on what we call the democracy-competetivenss dilemma in youth football as the game is getting more serious, and on the timing and tempo of why girls and boys stop playing the game. What remains is to analyse the elite material and summing up our findings in a book in Swedish.
