Emil Pull the Original Sin Malmö University 2020
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THE ORIGINAL SIN On displacement through renoviction in Sweden EMIL PULL DISSERTATION: MIGRATION, URBANISATION, AND SOCIETAL CHANGE EMIL PULL THE ORIGINAL SIN MALMÖ UNIVERSITY 2020 THE ORIGINAL SIN Dissertation series in Migration, Urbanisation, and Societal Change Doctoral dissertation in Urban Studies Department of Urban studies, Malmö University, Sweden and Doctoral dissertation in Society, Space and Technology Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University, Denmark © Copyright Emil Pull 2020 Cover art by Emil Pull ISBN 978-91-7877-143-1, print (Malmö) ISBN 978-91-7877-144-8, pdf (Malmö) DOI 10.24834/isbn.9789178771448 Print: Holmbergs, Malmö 2020 EMIL PULL THE ORIGINAL SIN On displacement through renoviction in Sweden Malmö University, 2020 Migration, Urbanisation and Societal Change Roskilde University, 2020 Society, Space and Technology Dissertation series in Migration, Urbanisation, and Societal Change, publication no. 13, Malmö University Previous publications in dissertation series 1. Henrik Emilsson, Paper Planes: Labour Migration, Integration Policy and the State, 2016. 2. Inge Dahlstedt, Swedish Match? Education, Migration and Labour Market Integration in Sweden, 2017. 3. Claudia Fonseca Alfaro, The Land of the Magical Maya: Colonial Legacies, Urbanization, and the Unfolding of Global Capitalism, 2018. 4. Malin Mc Glinn, Translating Neoliberalism. The European Social Fund and the Governing of Unemployment and Social Exclusion in Malmö, Sweden, 2018. 5. Martin Grander, For the Benefit of Everyone? Explaining the Significance of Swedish Public Housing for Urban Housing Inequality, 2018. 6. Rebecka Cowen Forssell, Cyberbullying: Transformation of Working Life and its Boundaries, 2019. 7. Christina Hansen, Solidarity in Diversity: Activism as a Pathway of Migrant Emplacement in Malmö, 2019. 8. Maria Persdotter, Free to Move Along: The Urbanisation of Cross- Border Mobility Controls – The Case of Roma “EU-migrants” in Malmö, 2019. 9. Ingrid Jerve Ramsøy, Expectations and Experiences of Exchange: Migrancy in the Global Market of Care between Bolivia and Spain, 2019. 10. Ioanna Wagner Tsoni, Affective Borderscapes: Constructing, Enacting and Contesting Borders across the South-eastern Mediterranean, 2019. 11. Vítor Peiteado Fernández, Producing Alternative Urban Spaces: Social Mobilisation and New Forms of Agency in the Spanish Housing Crisis, 2020. 12. Jacob Lind, The Politics of Undocumented Migrant Childhoods: Agency, Rights, Vulnerability, 2020. 13. Emil Pull, The Original Sin: On Displacement through Renoviction in Sweden, 2020. Publication is also available electronically, see mau.diva-portal.org To my interlocutors in their struggle Figure 1: Map of Uppsala TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ....................................................................................... 11 Abstrakt ....................................................................................... 12 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................... 13 LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES ....................................... 18 LIST OF PUBLICATIONS .................................................. 19 PREFACE – CORONA NOTES .......................................... 21 INTRODUCTION ............................................................... 23 Housing, homelessness, and displacement globally ................... 26 Renoviction and displacement pressures in Uppsala: How my study started .................................................................. 30 Aim and research questions ........................................................ 34 Main contributions ....................................................................... 35 Delimitations: what this study is and is not .................................. 36 Renoviction and critical housing studies: Where I position myself in the field ............................................. 39 Thesis outline .............................................................................. 42 Article abstracts ........................................................................... 42 Article A (published): Pressure and violence: Housing renovation and displacement in Sweden ................. 42 Article B (published): Domicide: Displacement and dispossessions in Uppsala, Sweden ........ 43 Article C (published): Displacement: Structural Evictions and Alienation ......................................... 44 Article D (published): A landscape of post-gentrification? A renovation case in Sweden ................................................. 45 DISPLACEMENT DIALECTICS IN SWEDEN ....................... 46 The birth, quick death, and rebirth of Swedish housing politics – displacement in the nineteenth and early twentieth century ......................................................................... 47 Experiences of a cultural homicide: Inner-city sanitization and destruction in the mid-twentieth century ............................... 52 Turn-around displacement and the abolishment of 40 years of housing politics ........................................................................ 58 The end of housing politics and the creation of a monstrous regime ........................................................................ 62 Renoviction as a profit strategy ................................................... 63 CRITICAL URBAN THEORY AND PHENOMENOLOGY ....... 69 Critical urban theory .................................................................... 69 Phenomenology .......................................................................... 73 Standing on two legs: Critical urban theory and phenomenology in discussion ..................................................... 76 Alienation as a key word ............................................................. 81 Alienation as displacement .......................................................... 91 On alienation of home and domicide ........................................... 94 Forms of residential alienation .................................................... 96 The displacement-emplacement and possession- dispossession dialectics ............................................................ 103 INTERNATIONAL DISPLACEMENT (AND GENTRIFICATION) LITERATURE ............................ 106 METHODOLOGY AND METHODS .................................... 116 The phenomenological process ................................................ 116 Material ...................................................................................... 118 Methodological reflections ......................................................... 122 Bracketing of knowledge and the veil of ignorance .............. 122 Positionality: My own displacement history and my relation to “home” ................................................................. 124 Building a repertoire: A transcribed snippet. February 23, 2017. Uppsala. ................................................ 127 The unstructured, phenomenological focus-group interview ............................................................................... 129 The conflict between the critical researcher and the phenomenologist in practice ................................................ 132 Reaching out to interlocutors: Snowballing and key informants ............................................................................ 134 Ethics and anonymity ........................................................... 137 Phenomenological data analysis and critical theory generation ............................................................................ 138 Using qualitative data analysis (QDA) – NVivo .................... 143 How to make notes to remember: Post-interview research note. May 31, 2019. Uppsala. ............................... 144 Using social media: Research note. August 26, 2019. Malmö. ................................................................................. 146 Emotions and ethical dilemmas: Post-interview research note. March 21, 2017. Uppsala. ........................................... 147 CONCLUSIONS ............................................................... 151 STATE PUBLIC REPORTS (SOU AND DS) AND LAWS (SFS) ............................................................ 157 REFERENCES ................................................................. 158 AUTHOR DECLARATIONS ............................................... 175 PUBLICATIONS ............................................................... 181 Abstract The thesis seeks to answer the following research questions: • How should the current displacement-induced renovations in Uppsala and Sweden be understood? • How is displacement in Uppsala and Sweden experienced by the affected populations? The section “Displacement dialectics in Sweden” will introduce the reader to Sweden’s housing regime and housing politics through an his- torical overview of displacement moments in Sweden from the late 1800 to present-day renoviction tactics. This is followed by a chapter detail- ing the dissertation’s ontological and epistemological vantage points and outlining the theoretical framework used to analyze displacement. It in- troduces certain takes on phenomenology and critical urban theory and how these two paradigms can reinforce each other through a reading of alienation. This is followed by a brief review on displacement in urban studies literature. The methodological chapter introduces the phenome- nological method in brief, and it mostly consists of a series of methodo- logical reflections on subjects such