Domestication of public space among Middle Eastern migrants in Malmö, Sweden

This paper introduces a PhD project, exploring the process of transformation and appropriation of public spaces by immigrants, and how it results in new functions in post-industrial, transnational Malmö, Sweden. Such spaces have attained significant importance against the backdrop of increasing ethnic and economic segregation. The project is methodologically based on ethnographic research, documenting immigrants’practices in everyday life. Theoretically, the research builds on concepts such as domestication, home making, everyday practices, materiality and territorial production. On the one hand, the transformation of Malmö in the wake of transnational migration implies challenges of socio-economic marginalization andspatial injustice, leading to a serious fragmentation of the city and its population. On the other hand, this project studies how migrants in Malmö, through creative exchanges and redefinitions, attempt to domesticate public urban spaces in resistance of such exclusion, segregation and injustice. Based on a cross-disciplinaryapproach, the research presented in this paper pays particular attention to the theory and practice of domestication through home making among immigrants. Home making in public space occurs when individuals or collectives extend the concept of home outside the physical space of their houses, through material culture as well as symbolic exchanges. Migrants emplace themselves in the public and leave traces and marks through different forms of performances, exchanges and confrontations. By doing so they are (re)defining and negotiating territoriality as well as visibility in the city. Through examples from my case studies, the paper will illustrate opportunities as well as barriers migrants face in such processes of home making. I argue that by appropriating new territories, migrants also produce new meanings in relation to home and public space, interconnecting past and present, here and elsewhere, through the domestication of the city