Finding the Way Home / Transkulturelle Perspektiven (PDF)

"Nora Räthzel
11. Concluding Remarks (p. 279-280)

The Importance of Local Space

Emerging from both studies is the importance that space plays for the ways in which young people live their everyday lives. First there is the “identity of places” in the public imaginary of the city, created through narratives about neighbourhoods as places of “racial harmony,” or “racial conflict”, as sites of criminality but also of multicultural lifestyles, or of right extremist activities. Then there are the more localized stories about safe and dangerous places within each neighbourhood. Finally, we see that the same micro-locality can be coded as safe or dangerous depending on who is talking about them and who is using them.

Some of the rules defining the relationships between places and people are the same in London and Hamburg. Young people of migrant background in Hamburg and black and Asian young people in London can enjoy safe havens in areas where they manage to appropriate public spaces. In both cities these young people enjoy the safety of these places as enclaves within a largely dangerous “world outside” where right extremist youth might attack them.

For native young people the feeling can be reversed: they might feel threatened or excluded by young migrants in their immediate surrounding, while experiencing that the “world outside” and society at large is their world, where they don’t have to fear the dangerous Other. In both cities the neighbourhoods with more mixed populations are seen as places of relative “racial harmony” in the public imaginary and in the stories of young people living there, while the two neighbourhoods with a small migrant (black and Asian) population are represented as places of “racial conflict.” This goes against the grain of much research on “racial/ethnic conflict” where the numbers of

Dr. Nora Räthzel is Professor of sociology at the University of Umeå, Sweden. She investigates forms of resistance and subordination through class, ethnic, and gender relations in cities, and among workers in transnational corporations.