Migration, place-making and the rescaling of urban space

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to contribute to a refined perspective on how the practices of everyday life can challenge existing spatial scale relations, as well as produce new ones, and how this in turn can be addressed by planning. The investigation is based on a discussion of empirical studies dealing with the role of migrants in processes of place-making and urban transformation. In the article, we look particularly at how migrants challenge more established scale relations of certain places and cities in Nordic countries. We illustrate how cases of heterogenic place-making contest established urban scales such as the home, the neighbourhood and the city, and suggest a series of modalities that may be used in the context of urban planning and design, to describe and study these processes in greater detail. The modalities include the notions of extension and compression, up- and downscaling, side-stepping and a multiple order of scales.

KEYWORDS:

• Scale
• migration
• place-making
• everyday life

Acknowledgment

The research of this project was supported by the Swedish research foundation Mistra through the research programme Mistra Urban Futures. We would also like to thank those who have commented on earlier drafts of this work, especially Peter Parker, Dalia Abdelhady and Torsten Janson.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Syriacs here (following Mack 2017, 271 f.) refers to the group ‘Suryoyo’, and includes both Assyrians and Syriacs (or ‘syrianer’ in Swedish).

Additional information

Funding

The research of this article was undertaken in the Skåne Local Interaction Platform of Mistra Urban Futures, the financial support of which is gratefully acknowledged.