This Open Access book examines how young people in Malmö's Rosengård district navigate life in the shadow of urban violence and enduring stigma. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it explores the imaginaries and lived social experience around Sweden's problematised urban areas and how stigmatising labels, such as no-go zones, are co-produced through media narratives, architectural design, and policy discourse. Rather than focusing on victims or perpetrators, the book foregrounds the everyday realities and political agency of marginalised youth in one of Europe's most stigmatised urban areas. It argues that these young people are not passive subjects of state neglect or social control, but active agents of democratic life, carving out alternative forms of belonging and resistance. In doing so, the book challenges dominant frameworks that locate violence and political instability outside Europe, reframing how we understand contemporary urban life, inequality, and youth politics within stable democracies. Combining urban sociology, critical race studies, and ethnographic methods, this book provides a nuanced, intersectional, and anti-racist account of life in the proximity of structural violence, and of the creative, collective strategies that emerge in response.

This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access Reframes youth violence in Europe through anti-racist, ethnographic insights into everyday life in Malmö's Rosengård Challenges the no-go zone myth by tracing its social, material, and transnational construction in Sweden Highlights how marginalised youth claim democratic space and resist stigmatisation in a highly racialised public debate

Autorentext

Katharina Wuropulos is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bergen, Norway

Inhalt

1. Imaginaries, violence and everyday life in Malmö, Sweden.- 2. When methods make worlds: Staying with the trouble of ethnographic research.- 3. Socio-material infrastructures of the no-go zone imaginary.- 4. Normative topologies and everyday life affected by violence.- 5. Socio-material interventions in problematised areas.- 6. Home-making, alliances between proximants, and democracy as the good life.- 7. Challenging and upending the imaginary of the no-go zone.