Fin de Siecle in the Urban Periphery

Th i:; a rticle deals with u rban youth w ith i m m igrant background l i v i ng in a soci a l houRing project in a town in Routh ern Sweden , Malmo. T h e approach ing fin ric siccle creates an abunrlance of contrarl i ctory, and often feti sh istic representat i ons of u rba n l i fe. Caught i n these representations, we fi nd u rban youth. Representa­ tions as these date back to colonial structures of !cel ing. These kinds of fetishistic response:; are now resu rfaci ng in the responses to ethn ically segregated hous i n g areas where i m m igrant youth a r e perceived as a threat t o the surrounding society. Th i s paper suggests po;;s i ble methodological approaches to this p roblematic, coupled w i th examples from previous work i n Mal mii concerning the hous ing a rea Rosengi\rd (the Rosegarden).

The approaching fin de siecle will bring fo rth an increasing amount ofboth utopian and dystopi an representations of urban life.1 In Utopia the urban experience is dissolved in hyperspace where we will all be happy netizens. In Dysto pia the urban landscape consists of clusters of fo rtresses separated fr om each other by danger ous no man's lands (cf. Davis 1992).
Caught between, but also entangled in, these representations, we find urban youth, trying to navigate through an everyday life filled with contradictory representations of their fu ture. These representations are, however, not new.
They date back to structures of feeling evoked at the heyday of European colonialism in the 1800s.2 Modern man defined himself in con trast to what he thought was inferior people at the same time as he had a secret admiration for the uncivilized (cf. To rgovnick 1990).
This kind of fe tishistic double-bind is now resurfacing in the responses to ethnically seg regated housing areas. The inhabitants are considered as a dangerous threat to society, at the same time as they are regarded as full of energy. This presentation deals specifically with urban youth with immigrant background living in a social housing project in a town in southern Sweden, Malmo.
I would like to map out possible methodolog-ical approaches to this problematic, coupled with examples fr om my previous work in Malmo concerning the housing area Rosengard (the Rosegarden) (Ristilammi 1994). This is a hous ing area with approx. 14,000 inhabitants. It was built in the late 60s and early 70s. In some parts of the area over 80 % of the inhabitants are offoreign origin. Over 70 different national ities live in Rosengard. In the school serving the area not one of the first-graders has parents of Swedish origin.
In Swedish political debate areas like these are considered as growing problems. The social democratic government has newly appointed a minister of integration whose main objective is the betterment ofliving-conditions in areas like

Rosengard.
These teenagers, all of them unemployed and most of them with refugee background, are trying to negotiate their identities through im ages fr om a global popular culture that draws authenticity fr om mimetic representations of alterity. On videos, on CD, on film the exciting life is lived on the edges of society, where crim inal activity -regardless of whether it is com mitted or fo ught against -is a source of escape fr om a life of fa ilure in school and unemploy ment. The titillations derived fr om these repre sentations are used by these teenagers to pro-Areas like Roscngiird arc symbolically cui off from oiher paris ofthe city wiih borders as this railway bridge.
voke responses of fear and interest ii:·om the surrounding society, resulting in demands for disciplinary action.

Fetishistic Encounters
An example of this would be an article fr om southern Sweden's largest newspaper (Syd suenska Dagbladet): "We are going to take over Malmo", fo llowed by: "Respect! We will take over the respect! We will make sure that Rosen gards reputation as the worst place in town lives on.
When these guys realize that I am a journal ist and want to ask some questions, they are drawn to me like flies to a cube of sugar." This meeting clearly echoes and evokes oth er encounters of a colonial nature. The repre sentatives of the Other are drawn to him like flies to a lump of sugar, but at the same time, he as a reporter is also drawn to them.
This encouter takes place in a suburb that is treated as a threat that risks to contaminate the surrounding society. These structures of fe eling are old. They derive fr om a time when techniques of dealing with indigenous popula tions in the era of high colonialism were being 38 brought back to western cities and were project ed to the "big-city jungles" here at home (cf. Ristilammi 1995 a and b). The reporter clearly has a mission to tell a story about otherness among us. He tells the same story that has been told about the Other fr om the beginning of modernity and indeed is a story that could be said to be constitutive to the creation of modern identity.
Rosengard's population comes to a large de gree fr om abroad. This can be seen as both positive and negative. The area can fu nction as an interface in which distanced communica tions can take place between that which is understood as ethnic alterity and that which is Swedish normality. In such a process normality and alterity are adapted relationally to one another.
A large concentration of ethnic alterity can, however, be perceived negatively, with an in creased risk of"ghettoization" and the develop ment of criminal gangs. These are processes which signify Rosengard as a sign of moderni ty's back side. Rosengard is always fo rced to relate to the processes of stigmatization which want to fix its identity through geographical determinism. The inhabitants are forced to defend their place or living-, and thereby their identity, in f'roni of' people who live in other areas . Th e cl assical modern ity question, "Wh o am I and who am I in relation to other people?" is consta ntly brought to I ilc whenever con tact is made with other people. Consequent ly, identity is not on ly someth ing worth striving li>r, bui can also be ::;een a::; ::;omeih ing which boxe::; in, lock::;, and reduces one's possibil iiies io a positive vi ew of one's self (cf. Ri stilammi 1995 c).
Th ese negative irlentiiy-proce::;ses are a re sult of a historical proces::; whereby certain traits in the identity-processes of modernity itself are being played out. The new areas came to function as front zone::; in which clear border::; were drawn between thai which wa::; consid ered io be modern and thai which was not.
The guidelines fo r these developments (and the public longing for the modern) had been drafted out two decades before ai th e fa mous Stockholm Exhibition in 1930, which was a symbolic starting point for th e Swedish moder nity-project. The houses were meant to be fa cto ry-made, but instead the building techniques used were still pure craftmanship (see Pred 1995).
The authorities began to plan for one last push to realize the "people's home". The run down and unmodern environments were to be cleared and the final bits of dirt and impurity were to be washed off of the body of society. The Swedish parliament made the decision to pro duce one million new apartments over a ten year period; it was called "the million pro gramme". The construction went very rapidly and people started to move into the area before everything was completed. For many, the move also implied a journey through time and up through the social hierarchy. Moving was, as in the late 1940s, an opportunity to become mod ern and to become a leading fo rce in the project ofSwedish modernity. Rosengard was one of the million programmes housing projects, planned fo r 20,000 people who were to live in apart ments produced by three different construction companies.
You could travel through time-space and social space at the same time. In this stage there was no time for looking back. It was a youthful stage, fu ll of hope for the fu ture. The waves of' moving-, in the city, from unmodern to modern areas, can be de::;cribed as compres sions ofhisiory in which th e geograph ical move ments symboli1.ed leaps along a perceived uxi::; of time. History was in th is story something thai should be lell. behind, or leaped over. The pre::;eni was a starti ng-poi nt tor the future.
I lowever, the area's back sides became ap parent rather q uickly. In the fr ont-lines of mo dernity, it was possible to rely on the strategy which had been drawn up in Sweden in the previou::; decades. H owever, by the beginning of' the 1970s more and m ore people in society began to view Swedish modernity as a cracked entity.
New working form::; for the social service::; were experimented with in several different residential area::; in Malmo, and many ofihe::;e later spread io other cities. One such new fo rm of work was neighbour hood work. In other words, the neighbourhood was to fu nction as a unit in and of itself, a unit in which people would take care of one another. However, what was important here was that solidarity would arise through mutual action. By working together towards a common goal in the neighbourhood, it was believed that solidar ity could be achieved. The opposite of this work was passive consumption which hindered a real spirit of community. Solidarity was to be place orientated, and for the radicals, the residential area was hoped to fu nction as a place where to build community. Resultantly, identity was also linked to place.
The contents ofthe words and concepts which were in use at the time were no longer obvious. After all, what was meant by "modern society"? In what way should one understand the concept of "democracy"? What meaning was contained in the word "solidarity"? What was "a good living environment"? During the few years be tween the late 1960s and the early 70s, values which had seemed to be fu ndamental to society were put into question. Parliamentary democ racy was criticized and it was thought that solidarity should be built upon and manifested in residential areas and factories and not through traditional political channels. The proc ess implies a crystallization of genres in which different causal contexts, historical chains of Rosengard was one ofthe million programme's hous ing projects, planned for 20,000 people who were to live in apartments by three ditl'crent construction companies. development, utopias, and dystopias are creat ed. One of these genres consists of youth cul tures.

The Uses of Mimesis
Many of the young people describe themselves as "kickers", a subcultural style that comprises of clothing-elements, such as shiny Adidas track suits, sneakers, shiny hair slicked back in a pony-tail and listening to different fo rms of Afro-American rap-music. The fa ct that immi grant youth model themselves on Afro-Ameri can youth-culture is an old one. At least since the 70s this division has been prevalent. Rock music played by "white" people has never been the preferred genre by immigrant youth cul ture. Other important traits in this culture has been the connection to territory and physical strength, the gaining of "respect" -a martial culture.
One of their counterparts is called "skaters", who are to a large extent Swedish youth with middle-class background who subscribe to a youth culture largely modelled on the skate board-revival that in Sweden has been going on since the beginning of the 90s. This middle class youth culture has been fo cused on speed 40 and motion .'rhe arena f()r the two youth cul tures has been the city and particularly the street.
A com pa rison between these styles of youth culture shows that the "kickers"-style, preferred by immi grant youth is much more b ased on territory. You " belong" to certai n nei ghbour hoods in the city. 'l'o me, th is e mph as i s on physical milieu, is a reflection and elaboration of the surrounding societies fe ti shism.
Th ose kids who met the re porter talked about respect. The o nly way they can get respect is by echoing, in a mimetic way, the fe ars that the surrounding society project onto them. There is a fetishistic bind between the reporter and the youngsters .
These youngsters are using Rosengard as a fr ee-floating sign which not only signifies Rosen gard, but also other similar areas. For them it signifies the respect through fe ar that they evoke fr om the surrounding society. It is the gap between the sign and the signification which creates disease and fru stration.
Of course it is not fr ee-floating in a way that makes reflection about power-relations redun dant. The possibilities for individuals to "free float" in this society are very unevenly distrib uted. It is often said that youth of today are gliding in and out of identities like chameleons changing colour according to background. But the youngsters who met the journalist in Rosen gard are, I would argue, fo rced in to very specif ic fo rms of cultural expressions if they want to assert some fo rm of dignity towards the outer world.
Whether they are materialized in newspa pers, research reports, or oral narratives among the people of Malmo, the stories about Rosen gard have become something which have to a certain degree lost contact with the reality of the area. However, this does not mean that this narrative or discourse lacks significance for the people of Rosengard. It is through this gap that the symbolic fu nction arises and which makes the poetry of Rosengard possible. In this arena which Rosengard constitutes, borderlines are maintained, which recreate and newly-create modernity to the extent that it must relate to the problems ofRosengard. Post industrial society is not articulated through a Today, commerce is rich amongst the modern buildings, although tax reasons make the fr uit merchants unwilling to appear in the photo.
political centre, but in its periphery where the borders are extremely obvious. Rosengard is one of these peripheral borderlands.
So what are the youngsters trying to defend? Some sense of attachment to the ground, the territory, they are trying to gain respect fr om the dark image of modernity's threat. It is the same threat that the journalist was using in order to catch our imagination -a mixture of fa scination and threat.
Rosengard has been connected to an eternal youthfulness which all those things you can attribute to youth. Energy, immaturity, lack of con troll, something to be taught and brought up to your own level. This youthfulness also points to a paradoxical link between ethnicity and the modern Swedishness.
At one point Rosengard was the essence of Swedish modernity. And, as several scholars have shown, the notion of modernity was at the core of Swedish national identity for more than fifty years. By thinking the suburbs as the counterpoint to Swedishness an important struc ture of fe eling in Sweden is being pushed into a modern unconscious. It became the missing link and evoked a shame over the unfinished modernity project. Official Sweden cannot al low itself to recognize these milieus. The myth ical power of modernity was too strong, as was also the fe eling of fa ilure.

Politics of Memory
With the approaching fin-de-siecle new ways of connecting identity to place, that echoes old structures of fe eling, are being evoked. The concept of place is once again brought fo rth as an antidote to societal fa ilure. Place is once again being perceived as a socially controlling instance. But places are also spaces in our imagina tion. We delimit them, we make them come One of the most prominent ideas in the ideology of modernist architecture, the nearness to nature, is finally beginning to materi alize in Roscngard .
alive through our actions, we tell spaces as stories. Michel de Certeau stated in his influen tal book The practice of everyday life, that haunt ed places are the only ones people can live in. Every place has its stories but for the most part these stories are dispersed, fr agmented, shared between you and me, nothing public. He wrote: "Memory is a form of anti-museum. It is not localizable. What can be seen designates what is no longer there" (de Certeau 1984:108).
So, what do these stories mean for the ques tions about memory in the outset of my presen tation? John Gillis states that both identity and memory has its politics, politics with possibili ties and risks (Gillis 1994). What would such politics of memory mean for the neighbourhood that I have described? In my view such a politics would mean taking account of all three of these phases of history that I have described. The obstacles are of course many. The first is the fa ct that the ideology that created the area was by definition a stranger to history and memory. The houses were to be monuments of nothing but themselves. The modernist vision only 42 looked to the fu ture. So in order to create phys ical memories, some sort of monuments, you will have to create a kind of aesthetics that in some way integrates both the modernist vision, and the everyday life of people who have lived in these milieus, that is, you have to historisize modernity. Some may call this a postmodern approach, but since this concept has been so diluted as to mean everything and nothing, I would like to avoid it.
The second problem, as John Gillis points out and that also Stuart Hall addresses, is that the creation of place-bound production ofhisto ry has to be selective and that means that the space of collective memory is a contested place (Gillis 1994, Hall 1996.All identity-production is a boundary-making activity that excludes as well as includes. It is this kind of excluding activity that many of the youngsters in Rosen gard are engaged in. As Manuel Castells points out; in this age of global information society, the tendency of the elites of this society is to take power away fr om the locale, leaving bitter local struggles behind them (Ca stel ls 1!-.!96). The ca pital wants to free itselff"ro m the constraints o f m erno ry and histo ry, pu::.hing those whoRe only weapon is th e defence of space, to precisely thai, a defens i ve often bitter and often fu tile activity, that ex cludes people fro m different loca les, but !' rom the same social strata , from each other. The new liH·ms of hi::;torizing· and identity-nwking must ta ke th ese negative processes in a ccount and make the l oca l a place where th e informa tion society and th e loca l everyday lilc can meet and find cultural expressions that exclude as few people a s possibl e .
Pow erful metaphors taken from the infor mation society talk about flows of information.
Its equ ivalent in the fin ancial world is the flow of money. Increasingly the Jlow of information, and th e Jl ow of money tends to be the same. In this metaphorical world nothing is allowed to stop these gl obal flows, not time, in the mean ing ofiime-zones and fl uctuations of night and day, and not the fr ictions of place . This powerful metaphoric language is of course spreading in to other areas. Work forces has to be flexible, and not bound by neither time nor place. This is a threat to mnemonic processes bound by place and time.
Michel de Certeau stated that haunted plac es -places with ghosts -were the only places people could live in. What is important is to symbolize these ghosts and not be content to let them live in the anti-museum of memory, that is to bring them back to the material world and let them constitute places. In my view this is the sort of activity in which we as ethnologists could participate, not as collectors, not as ideologists, but, as the angels in Wim Wender's Hi mmel iiber Berlin, as guides and listeners.

Notes
I. Paper given ut the Slll:F Conference in Am ster dam April 20-2!i, 1998. H.cscarch fi1 u ndcd by th e Swed ish Council for Building Research .
2. I am at t.hc present engaged in a project that deals with altcrity and modernity in the city of Mal mo. I n fluc nccd by Michael Tauss i g's usc of Wa l tPr Benjamin 1 try to identify th e feti shi stic qualities in the spectacles of the fi n -de sieclc Mal mii cg tlH' attmctions of the recurrent exhibitions (Ta ussig-1991(Ta ussig- , 1993.