Space Police - Institutional material practices for carceral subjugation of individuals in the built-environment

Sammanfattning

Sweden has in recent years experienced a punitive turn which is especially evident in its cities, whereby securitisation and carceral measures were adopted en masse, often circumventing previously dominant logics of universalists welfare approaches. This punitive turn is justified through self-reinforcing feedback loop of rising fear of crime necessitating further investments in order maintenance. It is puzzling how institutional actors, irrespective of being oriented towards reform or repression, within what is characterised as the planning apparatus, are united in their approach to safety-making. This (dis)unity was, irrespective of its manifestation, understood to impact the built-environment. Sweden’s vulnerable areas are of especial priority from the state to stabilise. The City of Gothenburg has a long-standing history of such efforts and as such, the vulnerable areas of Hisings Backa and Bergsjön are the focus of this thesis.Investigating safety-making in vulnerable areas is conducted through a mixed-methods approach of semi-structured interviews with concerned institutional actors, in order to develop a concise understanding of their psyche in regard to the City’s own theoretical framework for safety-making. These are complemented by two Systematic Social Observations along pre-determined transect walks for identifying markers of intervention and resistance. These methods are interpretated from an operationalised theoretical framework, primarily influenced by the works of Althusser (1995/2014), Davis (1990/2006), Wacquant (2008/2010).The results of the two-pronged investigation revealed a de facto disunity in collaboration among institutional actors. This disunity is not absolute as they are united in their shared realisation of the state’s primary ideology. The disunity nonetheless has varied implications for how so called (counter-)hailing devices manifest across the built-environment of the case areas. Whereby efforts by the state and its supporting actors to stabilise the vulnerable areas is not met without resistance.