Who Stays (Behind) in the Non-Place? An Ethnographic Study of Maritime Heritage, Institutional Occupation, and Post-Industrial Gentrification in Malmö

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines what happens to a city’s maritime heritage when it transitions from being lived in shipyards, to being managed in office buildings. Set in the post-industrial harbor district of Västra Hamnen in Malmö, Sweden, the study investigates how the gentrification of a former shipyard created the spatial and symbolic conditions for the World Maritime University (WMU), a United Nations (UN)-affiliated institution, to occupy the city’s historic port administration building, and function as a center of global maritime governance in a landscape emptied of its original maritime community. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted from a dual position as researcher and contracted staff member within the WMU, the study employs observant participation, reflexive ethnography, netnography, and media analysis to access the texture of both the socioeconomic dynamics of the city and the institutional life from within. The analysis is framed by an interdisciplinary theoretical apparatus that combines perspectives from anthropology and sociology. The study argues that the transformation of Västra Hamnen constitutes a deliberate purification ritual that produced a non-place specifically suited to institutional occupation. Within the historic building, the WMU actively maintains this condition through diplomatic neutrality, the management of local cultural expression, and what this thesis terms bureaucratic gentrification, meaning the selective institutional translation of embodied seafaring knowledge into the professionalized discourse of global governance. The study further traces how the city of Malmö borrows the institution’s UN prestige as symbolic capital, using it to consecrate its own post-industrial identity while the material and social realities of its maritime past are rendered ahistorical. The findings are relevant to scholars and practitioners working across urban development, heritage management, and organizational ethnography, as well as to municipalities and international institutions navigating the relationship between global governance and local identity in post-industrial contexts.