European liberal democracies are at a turning point. At a time when migration is increasing, many European countries still struggle with fully accepting migrants and other minorities. In this context, EU member states are introducing social policies and laws that police and reinforce social boundaries under the guise of maximising security, thereby undermining the idea of liberal democracy. For instance, we see how some have reinserted physical border controls, invested heavily in digitised ‘smart’ systems, and furthered legalisation to surveil, deter and minimise the means and mobility of many non-citizens in the process affecting many citizens alike. Indeed, these social, political, and legal practices comprised in what social scientists have labelled bordering practices –i.e. measures taken to attain social order and gain legitimacy by demarcating categories of people to incorporate some and exclude others– form a worrying pattern that has far-reaching consequences for the freedom of citizens and non-citizens and the quality of democracy at large. More concretely, it remains understudied how this bordering works in and through urban space, a crucial element in place- and home-making that will be the primary focus of this project.
While many fascinating studies have dealt with bordering from sociology and criminology, focusing primarily on the legal and political elements, the novelty in UrBorder resides in the combination of this path-breaking research, often designated interchangeably as crimmigration, with geography and urban studies. The crimmigration literature reflects how States in a growingly globalised world are using criminal law and justice to police the boundaries of legal practices in society, demarcate the line between wanted citizens and unwanted non-citizens, and through this reinforce racialised, classed, and gendered hierarchies around citizenship and belonging. This way, criminal law and justice replace border checks as a primary present-day technology of inclusion/exclusion. However, these practices of b/ordering –i.e. attempts to control and order the ‘unknown’ or ‘undesired’ subjects which operate at different scales– go beyond administrative exclusion to include labour market, housing segregation, and policing in urban space; all-in-all a varied and complex yet under-researched phenomenon which I have labelled urban b/ordering.
This phenomenon is present in new (by)laws where nation-states are using criminality as a deterrent against undesired practices in urban space, openly criminalising or problematising various marginal social groups by policing informal activities in urban public space, such as unauthorised urban vendors or others who live on and off the streets, such as homeless people. We see another compelling example of this worrying trend in Denmark, where, in 2018, the Danish government proposed and passed a set of laws dubbed the ‘Ghetto Package’ (henceforth, GP). According to the guiding document, minority groups from non-Western societies and cultures live in parallel societies and follow other customs than “ethnic Danes”. To curb this, the GP classify public housing areas according to different criteria, amongst which ethnicity is the most decisive: If an area with more than 1,000 residents meets two of four criteria on employment, education, income, and criminality, it is designated as “vulnerable”, but if more than half of the residents in this area are immigrants and descendants of immigrants (even if they are Danish nationals) of “non-Western” countries, it is labelled a “ghetto”, and after four years, it changes to a “tough ghetto”. In 2019, 15 areas were considered tough ghettos. Consequently, the neighbourhood associations of these areas had to propose an urban developmental plan to reduce the percentage of family housing by 60%, either through privatisation or private urban development; an intervention that would involve forced displacement and evictions if residents oppose moving.
Although laws like the GP are not passed because there is a severe societal threat, the actions taken have social and political consequences beyond the stated ones. While much of the existing literature dealing with bordering has examined the political discourse and jurisprudence, recent research argues that we need information on the bordering practices in and through urban space and their social effects. In dealing with this, UrBorder will complement a much-needed qualitative perspective on urban bordering and their effect on the processes of belonging and home-making, therefore aiding in constructing more cohesive societies. It aims to understand how socio-legal practices produce urban borders and sociocultural boundaries. It will do this by providing a theoretically informed, in-depth ethnographic account of the implementation and the socio-political consequences of the Ghetto Package in Denmark.
The overall aim with the project is to build up a field-based theory that will contribute to our understanding of the actual working of urban bordering, both in the role it plays in managing marginal social activities and groups and their societal and political consequences. To achieve this objective, UrBorder sets out a path-breaking research agenda. Although it builds upon the knowledge and findings of Contested Belongings –a two-year individual postdoctoral research project at the Centre for Criminology (CC), University of Oxford (UO), supervised by Prof. Mary Bosworth– it will focus on the lacunas of this and other similar research: The missing knowledge and data on the actual workings and implementation of urban bordering on the ground, which will include analysing the interplay of the different agents, narratives, and interests in situ. For instance, if comparing the different developmental plans in Denmark due to the GP at a glance, we see that although there are differences in the application, the overall logic is similar: The remodelling of the areas dovetails with the establishment of internal borders or boundaries between problematic or undesirable inhabitants and the rest. So, the logical questions would then be: Who are the subjects prone to be expelled? Who is desired? Under which terms? Moreover, what does that tell us about Danish society and who belongs, or not, to it? Consequently, this research project will focus on the following two research questions:
1) Who are the actors involved in the urban bordering practices, and what stakes and power relations are there?
UrBorder will provide empirical data on the different actors involved in the implementation of the GP. It will study how they interact with the policies and laws and their social positions and power relations.
2) What are the social and political consequences?
Though the GP does not explicitly aim to do so, it will unavoidably influence the field of belonging, even indirectly. UrBorder will illustrate potential consequences of urban bordering practices such as the GP on local society, and more importantly, their influence on minorities’ subjectivity and their sense of belonging at different scales (neighbourhood, region, nation), in accordance to economic, social, and cultural capitals and gender.
