Assembling Nightlife : The Emergence of Skanstull as a Nightlife Cluster in Stockholm

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how nightlife clusters emerge, are sustained, and negotiated through acase study of Skanstull in Stockholm. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews,participant observations, fieldnotes and photographs, the study explores nightlife as social,cultural and emotional charges instead of merely economic and spatial agglomeration.Instead, nightlife clustering is conceptualised as an urban assemblage continuously producedthrough interactions between people, places, atmospheres, temporal rhythms and informalpractices. Drawing on a cross-fertilization of assemblage thinking and cluster theory, thestudy develops a relational and processual understanding of nightlife clusters through theconcept of informal clustering.The findings demonstrate that Skanstull’s nightlife has emerged through bottom-up andinformal processes rather than from formal top-down planning strategies. Informal practicesoperate alongside formal frameworks such as permits, property relations, regulations andplanning frameworks that enable, constraining and stabilising the cluster. Cultural identity,spatial proximity, and relational networks are identified as central mechanisms, alongsideeconomic advantages, enabling the clustering formation. The study further highlights hownightlife is shaped through negotiations around governance, noise conflicts and regulationsand through embedded power relations on various levels permeating the cluster formation.The thesis contributes to urban nightlife studies by foregrounding the social, emotional andcultural dimensions of nightlife clustering. It also argues for more flexible planningapproaches and regulatory systems prompting for acknowledging nightlife as an importantsocietal socio-cultural infrastructure.