Urban B/ordering (UrBorder) - An Ethnographic Study of the Ghetto Package in Denmark
This project was an ethnographic investigation of urban bordering and the potential challenges to the social cohesion of 21st-century liberal democracies. The project was focused on the actors and stakes on the ground and the resulting societal and political consequences of the Ghetto Package in Denmark.
THE PROJECT IS COMPLETED
The project UrBorder aimed to understand how socio-legal practices produce new urban borders and sociocultural boundaries. It was do this by providing a theoretically informed, in-depth ethnographic account of the implementation and the socio-political consequences of the so-called Ghetto Package, which was adopted by the Danish Parliament in 2018.
The overall aim of UrBorder was to build up a field-based theory that would contribute to our understanding of the actual working of urban bordering, both in the role it plays in managing marginal social activities and groups, and the societal and political consequences. To achieve this objective, it build upon the knowledge and findings of Contested Belongings, a two-year individual postdoctoral research project at the Centre for Criminology (CC), University of Oxford (UO), funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. It was focused on the actual workings and implementation of urban bordering on the ground, which included analysing the interplay of the different agents, narratives, and interests in situ.
For instance, if comparing the different developmental plans in Denmark due to the Ghetto Package (GP) at a glance, we saw that although there were differences in the application, the overall logic was similar: The remodelling of the areas dovetailed with the establishment of internal borders or boundaries between problematic or undesirable inhabitants and the rest. The logical questions was then: Who are the subjects prone to be expelled? Who is desired? Under which terms? Moreover, what does that tell us about Danish society and who belongs, or not, to it?
Consequently, this research project focused on the following two research questions:
1) Who are the actors involved in the urban bordering practices, and what stakes and power relations are there?
UrBorder provided empirical data on the different actors involved in the implementation of the GP. It studied how they interacted with the policies and laws and their social positions and power relations.
2) What are the social and political consequences?
Though the GP does not explicitly aim to do so, it will unavoidably influence the field of belonging, even indirectly. UrBorder illustrated potential consequences of urban bordering practices such as the GP on local society, and more importantly, their influence on minorities’ subjectivity and their sense of belonging at different scales (neighbourhood, region, nation), in accordance with economic, social, and cultural capitals and gender.
UrBorder was an ethnographic investigation of urban bordering and the potential challenges to the social cohesion of 21st-century liberal democracies. The two-year research project focused on the actors and stakes on the ground and the resulting societal and political consequences of the Ghetto Package (GP) in Denmark.
The following outlines the methodological techniques used to answer each research question:
1) Who are the actors involved in the urban bordering practices, and what stakes and power relations are there?
To address this, the project carried out six months of ethnographic fieldwork in two housing areas affected by the legislation, either directly or indirectly, through the developmental plans. The areas was decided bearing in mind internal diversity, overall representability, and comparability. For instance, one of the areas was in a small town where no gentrification occurs.
Although it was intended to employ various methods, mainly ethnographic techniques such as participant observation and informal chats elicited information on who intervened in the particular practices studied. Furthermore, the project mapped out actors, their social positions, stakes, and interests, and, in a similar vein, compared the different developmental plans to discover emerging patterns and variety.
2) What are the social and political consequences?
To answer this, long-term observation and participation were crucial. In addition to participant observation – which provided crucial information on the residents for this phase – to elicit more detailed information on the meanings that the different actors ascribed to the practices and the immediate social consequences, the project conducted at least 40 semi-structured interviews, four focus groups, and ten life-histories with people affected directly or indirectly by the measures taken, as well as other residents, always assuring a representativity in terms of ethnicity, gender, class, and age.
The analytical focus was on detecting the resulting social relations and consequences on the ground, i.e., the impact on ‘local society’ and those deemed migrants and minorities in general, exploring any tensions, conflicts, and changes, both concerning the local practices and other local-global factors, thereby contributing with an ethnographic understanding of urban bordering.
Funded by:
UrBorder has received a two year funding from the European Union through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow programme and is based at the University of Barcelona.
Project: Urban B/ordering (UrBorder) - An Ethnographic Study of the Ghetto Package in Denmark
Period: 2022 - 2024
Contact
Martin Lundsteen
Affiliated Researcher at the Centre for Global Criminology
Postdoc, PhD
Department of Social Anthropology,
University of Barcelona
Mail: martinlundsteen@ub.edu
Phone: +34 934 037 507