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

Spaces of everyday life have different scales, and these often relate to each other in hierarchical ways. A neighbourhood is part of a city, and a city is part of a region. These simple scale relations are, however, becoming increasingly complex as global movements affect everyday life in different ways. One example of this is the continuous formation of new translocal communities, i.e. communities that are connected to other ones across regional and national boundaries (Greiner and Sakdapolrak 2013), sometimes challenging traditional scalar hierarchies within a nation state. Other examples might include the COVID-19 pandemic and its transformation and rescaling of different border controls, or the development of global companies and technologies challenging local businesses and customs. Different scalar changes have in planning studies developed in parallel with the rise of a more relational approach to planning studies, where important actors and stakeholders are seen as multiple, and in need of constant renegotiation (Hillier 2007; Boelens 2009; Metzger 2013). This includes a sensitivity to non-linear processes where new networks are formed and stabilised over time (Rydin and Tate 2016), as well as a sensitivity towards the proliferation of materialities and new actors and the roles they might play in planning (Metzger 2014; Beauregard 2015). In this paper we want to highlight the role of scale as such an important actor in formation, investigating and conceptualising how new scalar relations are formed in the city, and thus enabling them to be better considered in different planning processes. We do this by exploring a series of empirical studies on migration to Scandinavia. Recent research has often pointed to migrants as important and active actors in urban and regional rescaling and processes (Çağlar and Glick Schiller 2018; Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2009; Salih and Riccio 2010; Collins 2012; Schmoll and Semi 2013; Hall 2013; Listerborn 2015; Mack 2017; Hou 2013). Migration is in fact a good case for studies of rescaling. Urban spatial practices emerging from migratory experiences are potentially productive as they disrupt traditional claims about territory and territorial membership and rethink established relations of scale.

The purpose of this article is to contribute to a more nuanced perspective on how translocal practices of everyday life can challenge existing spatial scale relations, as well as produce new ones, and how this in turn can be addressed theoretically and used in planning studies. Here, we establish a discussion of different modalities of scale, based on a discussion of empirical studies made by scholars focusing on migrants and their role in processes of place-making and urban transformation. In the article, we look particularly at ways in which migrants as city-makers (Çağlar and Glick Schiller 2018) challenge the more established or stabilized scale relations of a certain place. Scale is here seen as vertically aligned spaces of different complexity, importance and/or scope. Scale relations are not only formed by formal institutions such as states and municipalities, but also in ongoing everyday life and through the body (cf. Koefoed and Simonsen 2012; Linder 2021). Furthermore, we take a relational perspective on space, following the idea that spaces (and spatial scales) are constantly produced, negotiated and remade through patterns of relations (Massey 2005; Murdoch 2006). We use secondary sources, especially from urban studies and migration studies, and look at cases of migration and spatial transformation from a everyday life perspective. With the everyday life approach, we follow the French tradition (Sheringham 2006), that in the wake of Henri Lefebvre see everyday life (and not least urban life) as related to resistance, creativity and societal change.

The cases discussed in this article have been chosen primarily because they deal with situations in which migrants as minorized newcomers appropriate and territorialise new spaces from disadvantaged and asymmetric positions, thus challenging established scale relations (although asymmetric positions are of course not unique to migrants). In the article, we thus strive to compare migrant experiences across ethnic groups to show that migration practices play a vital role in contributing to the heterogenic city in general (Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2009, 185), as well as in processes of rescaling in particular. We have chosen to focus primarily on cases from the Nordic countries, and especially Sweden and Denmark, which have somewhat similar immigration histories (Baycan-Levent and Nijkamp 2009, 392 f.). In both countries, labour immigration increased during the 1950s and 1960s, and was followed by an influx of an increasing number of immigrants fleeing from wars during the 1990s (e.g. from former Yugoslavia), the 2000s (e.g. Iraq) and the 2010s (e.g. Syria).

Following in the wake of increasing immigration, we can also see how the question of migration in Scandinavia lately has started to play a more active role in urban planning and design (Sandström 2019). For example, at Superkilen in Nørrebro, Copenhagen, opening 2012, we can see an urban design strategy of gathering urban street furniture and objects from all over the world, in an attempt of reflecting the multi-ethnic character of the neighbourhood. Another example is Jubileumparken in Gothenburg, a public space project planned for the city’s 400th anniversary in 2021, where organizing diversity has been an important part of the agenda (Sandström 2019, 215). To a certain extent, the role of migration is thus already starting to be acknowledged (and to some extent dealt with) by urban planners and designers. What we want to contribute with here is, however, not a formula for such designs, but rather conceptual tools that help us to acknowledge and take measure of changing scale relations in the city. New territorialisations establish new scale (and power) relations, relations that sometimes (but not always) might need to be stabilised through planning and design. For example, when does a municipality have to back up new activities in a city with spatial investments? and when can these needs be handled by private actors? Or, when must planning regulations be enforced? when can they be temporarily overlooked? and when must they be permanently changed? In this article, we propose a rudimentary vocabulary of modalities that includes the notions of extension and compression, the thrown-together of here and there, up- and down scaling, doubling or side-stepping scales, as well as acknowledging multiple scalar orders. These concepts might hopefully help us to navigate a discussion on rescaling beyond the idea of a single vertical order of scales (cf. Brenner 2004, 6f.; Latham and McCormack 2010).

Scales

Political and economic geographers have often viewed scale as an important, structuring principle; a hierarchically ordered system implemented from above. On the other hand, the scale has also been investigated as something produced in a historically and spatially situated context from below (Marston and Smith 2001; Nielsen and Simonsen 2003). In this article, we are interested in scales as constructed, and scaling as a way of performing reality. We are interested in the skills and practices involved in scale-making (or scalecraft to follow Fraser 2010) and in this sense, our study also relates to what has been called a poststructuralist take on scale (MacKinnon 2011). If we want to make scale production (as in the production of new scales) visible, it is in fact crucial that we go beyond the already well-established and clearly sanctioned scales. Linder (2021) has recently shown how COVID-19 brought about a rescaling of social life: life has to adjust to new distances between bodies, to an increased importance of the domestic scale, etc. This kind of rescaling suddenly becomes visible on a global level, and although quite salient during the pandemic, the rescaling of social life is as such nothing new.

Scaling can, in general terms, be described as the graduation of orders or spaces, and scales are often used as a way of taking measure, for example to measure if something is big or small, important or negligible (Kärrholm 2019). Caniggia and Maffei have defined scale as: ‘different level of complexity of the components internally arranged to construct a whole’ (Caniggia and Maffei 2001, 245). For a planner, for example, the spaces comprising a certain building or neighbourhood are often seen as existing on a different level of complexity than the spaces that make up a city. For scales to exist, one would thus need at least two different levels of complexities of the components producing effects (e.g. those of a city, a city district or a building), where the effects of different complexities can be seen as different scales. For scales to be produced, the first effect (e.g. a city district) must be relatable to the next, which means that it must make it onto ‘the map’, and into another complexity of components, such as the city. A thing does thus not have a scale of ‘its own’, it gets a scale when it is related to an entity of a different level of complexity. Things might be scaled for different reasons, but moving from one scale to another always involves an abstraction. A lived place in one situation becomes a part among parts on another scale; details disappear and some things become represented, whilst others do not. This also means that scaling is often closely related to issues of power and the ways in which power is embodied, exercised and distributed. There are, of course, things that cannot be scaled up or down in any meaningful way, for example, feelings or ecological systems (cf. Tsing 2012). Tsing has argued that the living world can seldom be scaled up without a violent translation into scalable logics (Tsing 2012). With her theory of ‘non-scalability’, Tsing stresses that scalability conceals a violent process full of friction. In a way, our approach to scale-making relates to Tsing’s theory of non-scalability, since we emphasize how scaling also involves friction and transformation. We must be sensitive to scaling and what it means, since scale is often where space and power intersect, e.g. in questions of who and what is entitled to represent a space of a certain type or scale.

What, then, is a scale relation? Typically, scale levels vary between disciplines. For the urban morphologists Caniggia and Maffei, typical scales are buildings, blocks and urban tissue types. For a human geographer such as Smith (1993), they might be the body, the home, the community, the urban, the regional, the national and the global. A tendency common in most studies dealing with scale, however, is the use of predefined or already naturalized scales. A certain set of scales can be described as a classification system that people utilise and share in different ways (what Bowker and Star 2000, call a boundary infrastructure), and in a world where spatial classifications are becoming increasingly standardized on national and international levels, so are certain scales. If we want to study the process of scale production, these pregiven scale will, however, not suffice. From an everyday life perspective, different temporal and spatial scales are produced all the time. To take a mundane example: When moving from an apartment to a house, we might choose to store both larger and smaller things in the garage. We have now scaled up our living situation; we have storage spaces of different scales. Things of a certain size or relevance go in one kind of place, things of a smaller size or relevance might go in another. At some point, the different scale of one’s storage spaces might affect one’s consumption, that is, what is saved and what gets thrown away. Storage spaces might follow standardized set of scales, but they might also be organized in new ways. In recent years it has, for example, grown fashionable to rent storages outside the home, in larger facilities often located in industrial areas (Brembeck 2019).

Different scales are often related to different sizes, but they might also – or instead – be related to varying levels of importance or different temporal durations. The storage example shows how spatial scales can be connected to temporal scales. Some territories are long-lived whereas others are not: we put a piece of furniture in the garage because we might not need it in the foreseeable future; we put a pen in a pocket because we might need it during the day. While the storage example might seem trivial, it is nonetheless useful: if we want to analyse how everyday life actions take part in rescaling cities (for example, how increasing private consumption of discrete things leads to the building of large-scale storage facilities in other parts of the city, car dependency, etc.), we cannot remain within the already given scales: the dwelling do no longer sit nicely in a nested set of scales (the apartment/house, the neighbourhood, the city); instead, a new territory has been established that crosses these scales – private storage units in large scale brownfield facilities. In the end, we might need to see the home in relation to a new kind of scale and to new places. We find ourselves with what Linder calls a new sense of scale:

scale becomes sense of scale when it acquires similar cultural, subjective and emotional resonances, This is distinct from place. It is not, for example, how one experiences a particular home (as a place) but how one experiences a general, commensurable domestic (as scale). (Linder 2021, 6)

We thus argue that scale-making goes deeper than simply combining or jumping pre-existing scales, indeed the urban scalar transformation that we can see also deals with the production of new scales – some of which do not fit into pre-existing categories, or within the relative size that a certain phenomenon is allowed or supposed to claim.

Modalities of scaling

The ongoing processes of rescaling and the proliferation of new scale relations are a vital part of all democratic societies. Following in the tradition of John Dewey, Noortje Marres has suggested that it is new issues that spark a public into being (Marres 2005). It is only when a new problem come to light, a problem not yet taken care of by a specific group, that a public is called forth. This new public (as any group) also needs to claim space in order to gain momentum. They need to go through what Lefebvre (1991) calls a ‘trial by space’:

groups, classes or fractions cannot constitute themselves, or recognize one another, as ‘subjects’ unless they generate (or produce) a space. Ideas, representations or values which do not succeed in making their mark on space, and thus generating (or producing) an appropriate morphology, will lose all pith and become mere signs … (Lefebvre 1991, 416–417)

New activities need to produce and reproduce space in order to exist. However, one could argue that Lefebvre, in his important insistence on space, forgot the notion of scale. We do not only need to sustain a particular space to make a mark, but we also need this space to be acknowledged on a map, it needs to establish itself as part of a scale relation. To succeed, a new cultural centre in Södertälje (an example we will discuss further below) cannot just be satisfied with ‘taking place’, it also needs to get on a map of some kind, e.g. on the map of the local neighbourhood, to get visitors, or on the map of Södertälje, to be acknowledged as a voice in the cultural politics of the city. Both space, or perhaps better put, territory (Brighenti 2010), and scale are important prerequisites for new issues to evolve and take place over time, and we need tools to address them. Here, we make a first attempt at developing such tools by suggesting and discussing a rudimentary vocabulary of modalities. These modalities build on an investigation of ethnographic studies of migrants’ everyday practices in the Nordic countries, with a focus of studies from the 2000s and 2010s, thus relating especially to refugees that was the dominant category of migrants at the time. The cases were not selected for being as representative as possible, but to give a rich number of different examples of scale production. The study is thus not based on a systematic literature study following certain keywords, but on a kind of snowball sample, starting out with some of the more well-known Scandinavian studies (or other studies known by the authors) and moving on from there.

Extension and compression

One of the basic ways in which scale relations are challenged is by changing the importance or extension of an existing place, and thus challenging its role and the way in which it sits in an established hierarchy of spaces and scales. In migration studies, a lot of investigations have focused on the role of domestication and the making of home, as well as the problems of feeling at home (Boccagni and Brighenti 2017). Home for migrants does at times quite clearly become ‘a matter of search’ (Boccagni 2016, xxiv); the home is both unfinished and a place of intensity and multiple meanings. Migrant studies have, for example, pointed to the home as a place where (often for lack of other places) ‘young children can learn about their parents’ cultural and religious traditions in their new homelands’ (Hirvi 2016, 24). Studies have also shown how the decoration of migrants’ homes can evoke memories of specific cities and places in the country of origin. This has for example been interpreted as a diasporic longing (Vacher 2007), where the homeland constitutes a symbolic place (Abdelhady 2008), a cosmos of senses (Hirvi 2016) or a mythic place of desire in diasporic imagination (Toivanen et al. 2014). This might in turn affect the ways in which the home relates to other places. In both Sweden and Denmark, ‘integration’ – as a politically defined concept – has shown itself to be important for how migrants’ home-making is perceived. Larsen (2011) illustrates how migrants are perceived as amoral disturbers of the established order, because they do not master the local Danish everyday practices and codes of sociability related to the domestic space in the new country. Relating to this, Vacher (2007) has described the home as a place where residents are freed from ‘integration demanding gazes’, pointing to a strong awareness of the differentiation between the public and the private among migrants. Signs, symbols and identity markers – particularly in public housing – are often turned inwards. Inside the apartment there might be a wide variety of items from the country of origin, but there could also be objects such as paintings of nature reminiscent of the country of origin that were purchased in a local Danish supermarket. Vacher’s point is that these indoor decorations do not reflect how people actually live in the country they have left, but rather suggest a diasporic longing or nostalgia (cf. Boym 2008; Ahmed et al. 2020), related to the experience of absence, distance and of being a stranger in a new land. This coming together, or ‘thrown-togetherness’ (Massey 2005), of here and there is also why a great deal of literature in migration studies deals with the creation of a hetero-homogenous space between cultures (Said 2000; Räthzel 2005; Nikielska-Sekuła 2016; Frykman 2016; De Neergaard, Kofoed, and Simonsen 2017). Transnational practices might challenge the home as perceived both from the inside and the outside, as well as the idea of a mutual exclusiveness between territories of different scales. Since the traditions practiced in the home are rooted in another country, city or local community than the one in which the home is geographically situated, one could perhaps first of all talk about ‘time–space compression’ (Massey 1992): practices and symbols of different countries or cities are enacted in the home, and these represented spaces are thus rescaled and associated with new places and temporalities.

Following the literature on migrant home-making, we can however also see how the practices and materialities associated with home are as much part of ‘expansion’ as compression. Home might be associated with other, related places where a certain culture or identity can be reproduced. Vacher (2007), has described this expansion on a very basic and material level, noting how, e.g. large freezers for storing homemade food, reflect the maintenance of kinship relationships through exchange of food. Frykman and Humbracht (2013) have explored how objects establish connections between people and places in a transnational perspective. Their focus is on objects (such as Italian coffee makers and Turkish teapots) that are carried from one place to another – back and forth – and thus, in the authors’ interpretation, contribute to a feeling of continuity and home-making, reconfirming ties of social kinship over time and space (Frykman and Humbracht 2013; see also Hirvi 2016). This act of creating continuity also involves time and the linking of the past into the present. Embodying a belonging to other places (or other scales) as it does, the home might be seen as compressed, but in the same stroke, it can of course also be seen as extended, since home-making might depend on a trans-spatial community in which social life and objects travel between homes, forming networks of circulation.

Outside the home, we can also see how inclusion and continuity seems to be at stake, for example, when a religious centre starts accommodating a range of diverse functions and services such as a cultural centre, a nursery, day-care and language tuition (Mack 2017, 2019). Such compression/extension of space may reflect the ongoing everyday process of social integration into a new society, where more homogeneous pre-public spaces (for example, to form the voice of a weaker group) might be of the essence (Räthzel 2005; Nylund 2007). In the cases above, the home as well as the religious space ‘qua’ community centre – although not challenged as places of importance – are contested as spatial entities, and no longer sit comfortably in a certain hierarchy of scales. Instead, they become embassies of other spaces; they compress and expand, throwing together a here and a there, challenging set territorial boundaries of different scales. This rich investment into a network of different spaces, all constituting part of a home-making or community-making process – might indeed need to be recognised and investigated in residential and urban planning. How can such spatial alignments be dealt with? Here, there are experiences that, for example, might very well be relevant in the contemporary rethinking of planning and design in relation to circular economy and new infrastructures for sharing (Hult and Bradley 2017).

Sidestepping

Another way of challenging a specific scalar order is doubling or sidestepping. If compression and expansion involve the introduction of actors from different elsewheres, sidestepping is the production of parallel situations. Lina Olsson’s study of retail stores in Rinkeby (Olsson 2008), gives us an interesting example of this. Rinkeby is a suburban neighbourhood unit outside Stockholm, and became a symbol for Swedish residential segregation in the late 1990s. In 2017, 61% of its inhabitants were born outside Sweden. During the 1990s, new stores in Rinkeby developed in old storage rooms and laundry rooms outside the neighbourhood centre proper, following a more traditional urban grid logic (rather than a suburban node logic) for their establishment. The new stores, mostly run by migrants, became almost as numerous as those located in the neighbourhood centre. The retail spaces of the area thus both expanded and took on a whole new form that – from a Swedish planning perspective – resembled a traditional urban spatial structure rather than a suburban one. Here, the new place-making side-step and double a certain territory (the retail area of Rinkeby), overlaying an existing structure with a new one, offering different kinds of goods and services as well as a different kind of spatial experience. In this process, shops slowly agglomerated into a retail area quite different from the one originally planned for Rinkeby. This new retail area also plays its part in the success of the individual stores, attracting new customers from afar and putting Rinkeby on the map. In another way, the area was also vulnerable, since it broke against existing planning regulations, and thus existed in a state of exception (Olsson 2008, 189 f.). The two retail structures - the old and the new - can both be seen as a single territory (the new enlarged retail area of Rinkeby), and as two separate ones, serving somewhat different needs and following different spatial rules and logics.

Sidestepping or doubling is an interesting phenomenon that we can see in several Scandinavian cities (one of us is, for example, studying a somewhat similar case at Norra Grängesbergsgatan, Malmö). As these new establishments break with existing regulations, the planners are faced with a conundrum. Should they simply overlook the regulations, or should they change them? Should they close the establishment or perhaps transform or even replace them? Sometimes the latter is used in an approach of appropriating the area and brand it as a migrant neighbourhood or as migrant retail (Schmiz 2017). Regardless, these new retail establishments tend to challenge the modernistic idea of suburban, urban and regional retail nodes, and subsequently also old ideas of how retail can and should be planned and organised.

Multiple-scalar orders

Compression/expansion entails a transformation of quality, and although (in contrast to sidestepping) it often means sticking to certain designated spaces, it involves contesting the scale and purity of spatially associated identities. Both compression/expansion and sidestepping can thus lead to the contestation of the very idea of a single vertical scalar order, and equally important, questioning a single line of belonging (what we perhaps can call a vertical homogeneity). This is a crucial theme in migrant studies where multiple belongings might play an important part in spatial production (Nikielska-Sekuła 2016). An interesting example from the world of sports is so-called diaspora teams, which might play a part in challenging a specific neighbourhood’s position within a scalar hierarchy. Sport can be a sphere of nationalism and racist expressions, but it can also be a sphere in which achievements can – at least potentially – be reached regardless of ethnic self-identification. It has thus also been used by newcomers as way of forming an identity and gaining recognition in a new place (Koefoed and Simonsen 2012, 635). On a group level, this kind of recognition has often entailed its own specific struggles.

Some studies have highlighted how local football teams double as a kind of diaspora teams (Olsson 2008; Mack 2017). In Olsson’s study of Somalia Week – the football tournament Seuko – originating in the Stockholm suburb Rinkeby, she addresses the issue of scaling-up a locally organised neighbourhood event to a transnational one (Olsson 2008, 105–170). The tournament targets Somalian migrants from all over the world. Starting in 1999, it has since welcomed teams from e.g. Denmark, the Netherlands, Canada and Finland. Pre-existing infrastructure was lacking on all levels, from where to accommodate visitors, host seminars and festivities to the question of where to play. Over the years, negotiations were held with a whole series of different sports venues, and even as ‘Sundbybergs IF’ was settled on, there were troubles both in terms of timing (the tournament needed to be held at a time when participants and spectators could take vacation) and belonging, where people from Sundbyberg felt that the event was ‘external’, and worried about their own access to a sport venue that they felt was theirs (Olsson 2008, 154 ff). In short, the pre-existing notions and resources associated with an international football tournament held in Sweden needed to be rethought and rescaled. There is in short a mismatch of scalar positions, with a team, expected to be local, organising an international tournament and needing to challenge an existing order of scales. The first step to challenging an existing scale order is often questioning one’s position in an existing hierarchy of scales and power, for example, my team or my home is part of a neighbourhood in a specific city, region and country, but it might also be an ‘ambassador’ for another region, city or country. The organizers might thus need to side-step a certain more conventional scalar hierarchy in order to accomplish their project. This also makes it evident that the idea of a single vertical scalar order is a myth (even though the common domination of one scalar order certainly is not) and that we all live by ‘multiple scalar orders’. A certain place or actor might well belong to a series of different scalar orders. A football team like Assyriska FF (Mack 2017, 117 ff.) might, for example, be a local team from the mid-size Swedish city Södertälje, playing in the Swedish football league, whilst at the same time representing Syriacs¹ worldwide.

Although ‘diaspora teams’ might make multiscalar orders visible, everyday life always involves the production of new scales. Challenging dominant scale hierarchies must not be seen as a sign of otherness, it is a basic necessity and a vital part of societal transformations. New media technology is a case in point, where the smart phone has been shown to provide us with a portable territory that also changes the way in which we relate to places. The sense of what scale that we deem important (the bodily interpersonal scale at hand, or the scale of the social network we are engaging in through our phone) might very well shift and certainly also affect our behaviour in different ways (Hatuka and Toch 2016). These changes – from the new demands of local/global diaspora teams to the new ways in which we use public spaces – also puts new demands on the built environment, and is thus ultimately something that urban planners and designers need to attend to.

Upscaling and downscaling

Finally, we have the notion of upscaling and downscaling, i.e. a reterritorialization process that involves a vertical moment on existing scale relations. In their article ‘(Re)scaling identities’, Koefoed and Simonsen (2012) address rescaling from an emotional perspective and define estrangement as a spatial relation, where bodies are blocked in their mobility and access to places. They point to the fact that migrants (and others) sometimes identify with the new city in which they live (rather than the new country), and furthermore to multicultural space as something that reduces the experience of being a stranger and allows for inclusion. Downscaling identity from a nation to a city could thus be a way of embracing multitude rather than trying to limit it.

Several interesting examples of upscaling can be found in Södertälje in Sweden. In her book ‘The Construction of Equality’ (2017), Mack explores how Syriacs of Södertälje establish new places and territorialisations of different scales, ultimately contributing to the remaking of Södertälje as a whole. In the 1970s, Syriac migrants borrowed various churches from the Church of Sweden, but besides the inconvenience of moving between different churches and the mismatch between the spatial layout of Swedish Lutheran churches and Syriac Orthodox rituals, these churches could not really accommodate the growing congregation. In 1983, Europe’s first Syriac church, St. Afrem’s, opened in Södertälje, built on a peripheral site (originally planned for parking). In 1990, another congregation (later called the St. Jacob’s of Nsibin congregation), rented an apartment to use as a space for worship, and it later went on to rent churches and even renovate a former tax house for their purposes. In the end, St Jacob’s Syriac Orthodox Cathedral was built with funding from other European countries, opening in 2009. Mack notes that the establishment of these two Syriac Orthodox Churches in Södertälje ‘transformed not only the urban landscape but also Middle Eastern Christian geographies – within Sweden and globally’ (Mack 2017, 117). Rejecting opportunities to use religious spaces in Stockholm, Syriacs invested in Södertälje as a national and global centre. Although built peripherally in Södertälje, the Syrian Orthodox churches have also become increasingly visible parts of the urban landscape over the years with e.g. onion domes, large orthodox crosses, etc.

Mack’s studies also point to how this redesign and place-making shows an ambition of being recognized on new arenas, often scaling-up local services to nodes of urban, regional, national or even international importance. One example here is also the infrastructure for weddings that has been developed in Södertälje over the years: ‘Dress shops, hair salons, banquet halls, flower designers, and caterers transform the town into the centre of a major industry’ (Mack 2017, 154). In fact, Södertälje has even been described as a wedding city, and although initially targeting the Syriac orthodox groups, the infrastructure of large weddings (with venues accommodating up to 800 guests) in the city is unique in Sweden, and has also begun to attract new groups and people from other cities (Mack 2017, 143). Södertälje is thus a globally important religious and cultural centre for Syriac groups and a nationally important wedding centre for other (partly overlapping) groups.

Mack (2017, ch. 5) furthermore explores an example of upscaling as related to the home in the Södertälje neighbourhood ‘Lina Hage’ – nicknamed ‘Hollywood’ – and its transformation into a fancy area with large houses. These are inhabited mainly by Syriacs who have ascended from renters to homeowners. Through official building permits, they have created a neighbourhood in a mixed American and Assyrian style, with huge stone houses encircled by garden walls (relating to Tur Abdin in Syria), decorated with plastic flowers. The fronts of the houses facing the residential street feature symbols devoted to Assyrian patriotism, such as Assyrian sun-clocks and statues. At the same time, some materialities of Lina Hage have been regarded as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas in Mack 2017, 205), and for some urban planners, the area reflects a loss of municipal control and an inability to handle new situations. Interestingly, the neighbourhood Lina Hage has also seen the return of the ‘finrum’ (a parlour, Mack 2017, 228 ff.), a room type that has not been used in Swedish plans for many decades. Here we thus see a clear upscaling of residential spaces, reinventing and developing more formal and representational spaces of the home both in the interior and exterior.

When the migrant home is upscaled in concert, as in the case of Lina Hage, the upscaling also comes to represent a challenge to municipal control and power. Mack’s case study of Södertälje can be used to show how visibility – and putting things ‘on the map’ – relates to upscaling. The notion of visibility and legibility (so important in these examples) can, however, also be seen as related to down-scaling. Studies by Listerborn (2015) and Sixtensson (2009) illustrate, for example, how the issue of Muslim urban visibility involves the geographies of women wearing head coverings in Malmö, Sweden. Interviews with veiled women showed that they tended to avoid important central public spaces, preferring the part of the central city south of the pedestrian district. In principle, this seems to indicate a downscaling of the city centre for certain groups, which in turn leads to a fragmentation of the city centre. It also reflects that Muslim migrants are often placed at the lower part of the ‘hierarchy of cultures’ (Stolcke 1995) in many European countries (Silj 2010). Another study (Kärrholm and Wirdelöv 2019) has shown how the fragmentation and rescaling of a certain neighbourhood in the city of Lund, just north of Malmö, have developed over time. Here retail services began establishing themselves outside the neighbourhood centre, creating a series of different retail nodes attracting different socio-economic groups. Downscaling – the reduction of a symbolic and positional significance of a certain type of place – can thus not be seen as an isolated event, but affect the development of other types as well. A neighbourhood retail centre might lose its significance overtime, and become subdivided into ‘migrant’ stores, ‘cellar’ stores, ‘regular’ stores, etc.

Both down-scaling and up-scaling are clearly related to the processes of compression/extension as well as sidestepping and doubling. Often these processes go together, but still, it might be important to keep them apart analytically; compression can, for example, lead both to up-scaling and downscaling. These changing power relations can be supported or not through planning. Here, it is important to note that the act of rescaling in general seems to be related to a variety of emotions, social relationships and power relations. The cases we have discussed include, for example, creating alternative spaces of identification to reduce the experience of being a stranger (Giritli-Nygren & Schmauch 2012; Listerborn 2015; Koefoed and Simonsen 2012), inverting experiences of status and power (Diatlova 2018; Mack 2020), or creating nostalgic spaces of diasporic longing (Hirvi 2016; Vacher 2007). Rescaling is thus never an innocent or victimless process. As a territory replaces another, as some make it onto the map of a certain political or cultural landscape, and others do not, power relations shift.

Concluding discussion

In this article, we have suggested a series of notions to describe and follow activities that are involved in rescaling. The introduced notions include extension and compression, upscaling and downscaling, doubling, and side-stepping scales, as well as acknowledging multiple scalar orders (thus questioning the idea of a single vertical order of scales). Our hope is that these notions put together can form a small vocabulary and help facilitate the mapping of different urban rescaling processes. Through the examples above, we have shown how different types of place-making traverse spaces of the home, the neighbourhood and the city. There are of course many important scales that we have not addressed, such as the municipal scale – which is a very strong actor in the life of inhabitants in Nordic countries, not least migrants (see Grange and Björling 2020).

In the article, we have emphasised some aspects of how scale-redefining practices take place in everyday life, thus challenging a nationalist world view and boundaries that define and naturalise spaces as part of certain scales. Everyday life should not be seen as an incongruous existence within a pre-existing scale, but as an active contributor to the continuous place-making and scale production present in any living society. We are always in the midst of vertically and horizontally organised territories. The examples that we have discussed above reflect how agency and everyday tactics challenge the hegemonic notion of an expected location and scale for certain activities. Such tactics represent subtle practices that comment, critique and symbolically invert existing power relations in society, and over time hopefully succeed in making new places and even establish new scales of importance. As Buhr has pointed out, we need to overcome the assumption that local life is provincial (Buhr 2018, 316), it was always part of trajectories and excavations of larger surroundings, and it is today also becoming increasingly translocal. Such translocalities are fertile ground for new alignments between territories as well as scalar change.

In public debates on urban planning, visibility is often an important aspect when it comes to the construction of new migrant spaces, not least religious spaces, such as mosques (De Neergaard, Kofoed, and Simonsen 2017). Public (majority) evaluations of ‘good and ‘bad’ integration affect both the building of migrants’ religious places and home-making (Mack 2017; Vacher 2007; Larsen 2011). Such evaluations reflect that place-changes involve evaluations of a place’s mode of existence according to material-sensual form, identity and location (Munn 2013). As visible (and audible) symbols of ‘Muslimness’, mosques are, for example, highly contested in many European countries (Cesari 2005). In Denmark, mosques have often been relegated to sites in suburban peripheries (Jacobsen 2015; De Neergaard, Kofoed, and Simonsen 2017). New time-scales and new historic contexts come into play. Here it is important to remember that place-making and its effect on scale do not only relate to spatial change, but also to temporal change, e.g. when different historic contexts are used in arguments against the building of mosques. Visibility thus not only relates to space, but can also be seen as related to the kind of temporalities and histories that are allowed to become salient in a city.

Here we argue that visibility and legibility are fundamental conditions for scale production, as a spatial figure or temporal salience is produced in the public consciousness. Furthermore, this is visibility that can be supported by planning or not. When a place makes it onto a map, it becomes a part with other parts on a new scale. The production of new spatial forms through place-making might grow into stronger collective crystallisations (Brighenti 2020); i.e. into more salient urban figures that take on a certain legibility in the city. As places assume more stable forms, they need to be acknowledged and related to other places; they will not simply be a whole, but also a component among other components – in short, they become a part in scale-making. Scaling thus often makes a qualitative thing quantitative (cf. Tsing 2012), a place becomes measurable – which is important in order to be counted and accounted for in planning processes. In a sense, it involves both a Lefebvrian ‘trial by space’ and a ‘trial by scale’. It is not only by appropriating a certain space, but by enabling it to be counted as a territory in the wider community over time (and to make it onto the map) that a space and thus a new group or activity becomes legible and seen as belonging to a certain scale level. Södertälje, for example, is no longer simply a small city just outside Stockholm; it has also become ‘Mesopotälje’ – a kind of capital in its own right (Mack 2017, 272).

Although Scandinavian planning has started to include migrants as actors in the planning of public spaces (Sandström 2019), these new projects mostly involve spatial change on a horizontal level – i.e. introducing new kinds of public spaces adjacent to more traditional ones. Processes of rescaling are, however, seldom addressed in planning. Places and urban areas can be designed and redesigned in innovative ways, but how this affect their place in the existing spatial hierarchies of the city is often left unaddressed. We argue that in order to better allow for the spatial production of new groups and activities, we also need to study how spaces move in more vertical fashions and how we can plan for this. The spatial ecology of our cities is not flat, but already stratified, horizontally as well as vertically. Furthermore, we need to acknowledge that this verticality is not fixed and cannot in any definite way be set by any kind of authority; instead, it is fluid and exists in multiple and always multiplying versions. To plan for the spatial development of our societies, we need to see how these stratifications develop and regroup over time, how new scales align, and how the world increasingly comes to be measured on a series of rulers with different scales. The hard work of scale production is often a very real problem for migrant groups, but it is of course not only a problem for migrants. We are thus not arguing for specific planning for migrants, but for new sensitivity towards processes of scale making in general. The place-making of migrants might, from the planner’s perspective, perhaps appear anomalistic and specific, but it is actually putting a finger on something that always has existed and that is an important part for all groups and communities in transformation, as well as for any living, democratic society: the ongoing trials of space, the right to be acknowledged, the renegotiation of scales and the constant proliferation of new scalar relations. Here, planning can play a supporting role or not, but to stay relevant it needs to be aware of the problem and, not least, involve it in its discourse.

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).

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.

Notes

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