Äga rum: Offentliga rum betraktade i ett politiskt perspektiv, fallet Pristina

In order to fully grasp the phenomena 'City' we must understand its political structure as an integrated part of its physical structure and vice versa. This thesis focuses on one crucial element of the City, the public space, and discusses it in relation to the public realm, or sphere, of the City. The aim is to see if it is possible to conceive public space as a spatial dimension of power, and if so, how to analyse this. With the help of the theoretical tool of two ideal types of the configuration of public space, "The city as civic public life" and "The city as authoritarian control" an empirical study is carried out on the case of Prishtina, capital of Kosovo. Conclusions made are that function and use of a city's public spaces can be understood in relation to changes in the political climate of the society. Furthermore, a void in the asset of concepts offered by the ideal types is found ? and therefore also need for new concepts to describe and understand a public space undergoing a dynamic transformation, as being a part of a city in political transition

Dörren står öppen, men torka av skorna! En uppsats om statliga normer för ungdomars politiska organisering

En betydande del av Sveriges nationella ungdomspolitik syftar till att ge ungdomar större inflytande över samhällsutvecklingen. De målformuleringar som staten skapat genom bland annat regeringens liggande ungdomspolitiska proposition, har intresserat oss. Denna uppsats behandlar de normer som staten, genom olika dokument och skrifter, konstruerar för hur ungdomars politiska engagemang bör organiseras och tas till vara. Med hjälp av kvalitativ textanalys har vi sökt identifiera dessa normer i vårt utvalda material, för att sedan på en hög abstraktionsnivå diskutera vad dessa kan få för effekter för det demokratiska styrelsesättet. Vår slutsats är att det saknas en medvetenhet om de vidare implikationer som den nationella ungdomspolitiken får, och vi efterlyser därmed en bredare diskussion i ämnet

The void : Urban wasteland as political space

The rugged field and group of trees between housing estates or next to the railroad tracks, the left-over space of deserted industrial areas, the vacant demolition site of a central city block – they could all be termed ‘urban voids’. However, they are often anything but voids, in a literal sense, as they are not empty, or deserted. Yet they are ‘urban voids’, lacking an evident function, or a definition according to a plan. It is a category of urban space constructed as a nothingness, even though the very same space is often used for a variety of purposes. The aim of this thesis is to show how the urban void becomes as the constitutive outside of the City. It investigates the difference made between well-defined urban spaces (known by names such as ‘street’, ‘park’, ‘parking lot’, ‘housing block’) and the other kind of space. The production of the void – either it is made a no-space, devoid of any meaning, or a mesmerising rabbit- hole leading to another world – is here understood as fundamentally political. With a relational conception of space and an anti-essentialist conception of politics and the political, the author conducts a deconstruction- inspired analysis of the becoming of the urban void as another kind of space. The Derridean notion of an undecidable provides a figure of thought that hinges the analysis together with a particular way of under- standing how dominant discourses on the City and conceptualisations of the urban void interact to deter- mine each other. It does not present a “truer” version of the urban void, but aims to shake up the dominant modes of conceptualising the phenomenon. The analysis engages a variety of texts – whether in the shape of what one might call ‘theory’, or ‘empiri- cal material’, or a TV-series, or a novel – and the thoughts provoked by working with those texts, have been edited into a montage. Fieldwork – in Athens (Greece), Berlin (Germany), Brasília (Brazil), Malmö and Stockholm (Sweden) – interviews, analyses of policies and plans, and close readings of academic literature from a range of different fields, have generated material for the study. The editing of a montage is, however, more than a mere methodological tool or a way of writing; with Rancière’s notion of ‘indisci- plinary thought’ it politicises the way of making the analysis by engaging a variety of perspectives and material in different forms that transgress disciplinary boundaries. The thesis not only writes the urban void into politically relevant space, but also represents it in a way that makes it obvious as a politically relevant space. It brings the ‘no-spaces’ out of an (assumed) obscurity, yet at the same time de-mystifies the (same) fascinating places, in hope of a less polarised and more nuanced discourse on the urban wastelands. Only then can the existence of the urban void as a category of left over space be questioned, and the thesis concludes by opening up for future inquiry the question of what kind of city could become from a point of view where the urban void is just another kind of space

Staden mellan visionerna och asfalten: En studie av politiska idéer och visioner om staden ur ett rumsligt perspektiv

Urban planning is not only a matter of architectural trends; it is first and foremost political. This thesis seeks to understand the links between political ideas and visions for the city and the physical structure of the city. The study aims to construct a model to help understand these links, a helpful tool in analysing a city, focusing on the one hand at the physical structure of what I call "The City as a Welfare Provider" and on the other hand at "The City as a Growth Engine". It also sets out to test this model in an empirical study of Stockholm and the soon-to-be built district of Norra Station in the same city. The analysis shows that Stockholm has ambitions to be a welfare provider to its citizens, but have also adopted to a discourse of interurban competition which stresses the importance for the city to enhance economical growth. What is interesting is that the physical structures promoted in the planning documents of Stockholm are nearly exclusively those associated with the model of "The City as a Growth Engine"