Emil Pull | Malmö University (original) (raw)

Papers by Emil Pull

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2020

This is a themed issue about displacements. Or more precisely, about research grounded in narrati... more This is a themed issue about displacements. Or more precisely, about research grounded in narratives of people suffering displacement in its various forms, and their all too visible and yet oftentimes made-invisible demographics. ‘All too visible’ as those individuals or groups stand out either as scapegoats on which to lay blame for urban problems, or as the human fallout of ongoing processes of class struggles and racialised conflicts under neoliberal, neocolonial and neonationalist regimes of spatial encroachment. Yet, their subjectivity, agency and voice are invisibilised in public and political discourse, as well as in academic research, or they are altogether erased through the poor selection of methodologies that fail to capture the discrete statistical categories that can register displacement. Therefore, those afflicted by it become un-researchable. The papers within this themed issue collectively seek to re-center displacement, through investigations and narratives of displaced populations.

Housing Displacement. Conceptual and Methodological Issues, 2020

It is in the act of displacement that housing injustice finds its prime expression. Therefore, di... more It is in the act of displacement that housing injustice finds its prime expression. Therefore, displacement needs to take a much more central place in our understanding of urban injustices. With this book, we want to reveal how housing displacement processes mutate into new forms and are more diverse than have been acknowledged thus far in the literature. We need to think beyond the existent gentrification literature to understand the reasons and consequences of housing displacement, especially considering geographical differences. We propose giving primacy to researching displacement processes when studying socio-spatial change in the city-even though it is empirically and methodologically more demanding-for several reasons. First, through studying displacement we can, as said, put more focus on gentrification's unjust nature. Second, we can highlight unjust housing policies in cities and neighborhoods that are simply not undergoing gentrification. Third, it is vital to demonstrate how expulsion in all its varieties, though under-researched, has become a vital component of contemporary advanced capitalism (Sassen, 2014). Fourth, the dominance of the concept of gentrification has not only hindered a potential focus on its flipside-displacement-but it has also hindered the study of the occurrence of poor cleansing from a long-term historical perspective. While gentrification is still taking place and will take place in many cities across the globe, it should perhaps no longer be considered the defining factor of unjust urban social change-displacement precedes gentrification. We suggest that the systematic ways in which governments and landlords seek to remove unwanted segments of the population from (inner) cities or prevent them from moving in, with or without subsequent gentrification, is the defining factor of contemporary urban injustice. Thus, this book not only gives examples of how displacement manifests itself in different contexts, it also aims to further our understanding of the underlying power relations.

Housing Displacement. Conceptual and Methodological Issues, 2020

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2020

This is a themed issue about displacements. Or more precisely, about research grounded in narrati... more This is a themed issue about displacements. Or more precisely, about research grounded in narratives of people suffering displacement in its various forms, and their all too visible and yet oftentimes made-invisible demographics. ‘All too visible’ as those individuals or groups stand out either as scapegoats on which to lay blame for urban problems, or as the human fallout of ongoing processes of class struggles and racialised conflicts under neoliberal, neocolonial and neonationalist regimes of spatial encroachment. Yet, their subjectivity, agency and voice are invisibilised in public and political discourse, as well as in academic research, or they are altogether erased through the poor selection of methodologies that fail to capture the discrete statistical categories that can register displacement. Therefore, those afflicted by it become un-researchable. The papers within this themed issue collectively seek to re- center displacement, through investigations and narratives of displaced populations.

ACME, 2020

Despite decreases in formal evictions in Sweden, housing precarity measured through homelessness ... more Despite decreases in formal evictions in Sweden, housing precarity measured through homelessness as well as through various forms of displacement is increasing. It is therefore important to conceptualize beyond evictions when looking to the condition of various housing regimes. Forced relocation following renovations (renoviction) is a dominant form of displacement in Sweden today, and this form of displacement makes little difference compared to formal evictions, in terms of outcomes for both landlords and tenants. Drawing inspiration from displacement literature, I suggest conceptualizing all forms of 'mundane displacement' that lead to forced relocation as 'structural evictions'. By mundane displacement I mean displacement processes instigated from within an already established political and legal framework, by actors in the realm of housing, that result in for instance increased costs of living for households to the extent that they are forced to leave their homes. I will use the example of renoviction to show how the boundary between formal evictions and structural evictions through renoviction are blurry at best. In this paper the similarities between formal evictions and displacement through

This article investigates the lived experiences of tenants ‘staying put’ in two neighborhoods und... more This article investigates the lived experiences of tenants ‘staying put’ in two neighborhoods undergoing urban renewal processes and increased rent levels in Uppsala, Sweden. The article is drawing on a place sensitive analysis to escape an ‘Euclidean prison’ that we contend underpin many displacement studies; studies that reduces the notion of displacement to only signify out-migration. Such studies often miss both the scope of displacement, and the grievances experienced by tenants following changes in place and space under various urban transformation processes. Through phenomenologically inspired interviews with tenants we contend that place cannot, as it often is in practices of urban development, simply be understood as coordinates on a map, but has to be understood relationally. Adhering to such a place-sensitive understanding of space our study asks what changes to place and to ‘home’ is experienced by tenants staying put in neighborhoods under increasing displacement pressures. What surfaces is a series of displacements that can be categorized as spatial dispossessions; thematised under subcategories ‘contraction of home’ and ‘withering entitlements’, and temporal dispossessions; categorised under ‘life on hold’ and ‘erasure of history’. These displacements are suffered by tenants who despite displacement pressures has remained throughout the renewal process.

Trygghet är en subjektiv upplevelse men används av både politiker och fastighetsaktörer som skäl ... more Trygghet är en subjektiv upplevelse men används av både politiker och fastighetsaktörer som skäl för upprustningar som i förlängningen kan skapa större otrygghet för många. Det skriver forskaren Emil Pull

I takt med att miljonprogrammet börjar rustas upp, efter i många fall decennier av eftersatt unde... more I takt med att miljonprogrammet börjar rustas upp, efter i många fall decennier av eftersatt underhåll, börjar två typer av rapporter bli vanligare i dags-och fackpress. Den första typen handlar om att

Based on interview material relating to the current wave of housing renovation in Swedish cities,... more Based on interview material relating to the current wave of housing renovation in Swedish cities, this article will analyse the profit-driven, traumatic and violent displacement in the wake of contemporary large-scale renovation processes of the so-called Million Program housing estates from the 1960s and 1970s. We maintain that the current form of displacement (through renovation) has become a regularized profit strategy, for both public and private housing companies in Sweden. We will pay special attention to Marcuse's notion of 'displacement pressure' which refers not only to actual displacement but also to the anxieties, uncertainties, insecurities and temporalities that arise from possible displacement due to significant rent increases after renovation and from the course of events preceding the actual rent increase. Examples of the many insidious forms in which this pressure manifests itself will be given – examples that illustrate the hypocritical nature of much planning discourse and rhetoric of urban renewal. We illustrate how seemingly unspectacular measures and tactics deployed in the renovation processes have far-reaching consequences for tenants exposed to actual or potential displacement. Displacement and displacement pressure due to significant rent increases (which is profit-driven but justified by invoking the 'technical necessity' of renovation) undermines the 'right to dwell' and the right to exert a reasonable level of power over one's basic living conditions, with all the physical and mental benefits that entails – regardless of whether displacement fears materialize in actual displacement or not.

This paper argues that the ongoing renovations of the old rental stock in Sweden produces severe ... more This paper argues that the ongoing renovations of the old rental stock in Sweden produces severe displacement of low income households, and should be seen as the most recent wave of neoliberalisation and marketization of the Swedish housing regime. Further it is suggested that the renovations entail a severe circumscription of lawful tenants' rights, but that the processes nonetheless are being supported by juridical bodies such as the Rent Tribunal. The combination of actors facilitating this process of accumulation by dispossession lends itself to the conclusion that not only the serious consequences on part of displaced tenants, but the process in and by itself present an emblematic example of structural violence.

*With apologies for possible cross-posting* Dear colleagues, Jacob Lind, Emil Pull and myse... more *With apologies for possible cross-posting*

Dear colleagues,

Jacob Lind, Emil Pull and myself are seeking submissions for the session "Narrating displacement: Lived experiences of urban social and spatial exclusion" to be held during the AAG Annual Meeting in spring 2016.

You can find the session's abstract as well as submission details both in attachment and below. We would appreciate it if you could circulate this call for papers among your colleagues and other potentially interested parties.

For more information, please contact us at ioanna.tsoni@mah.se
-----
" From the ghastly spectacle of the refugees’ plight along the shores of the Mediterranean, to the myriad of imperceptible and often veiled injustices suffered by residual urban dwellers, the landscape of exclusion today unfolds into a fluctuating, yet solid, web of physical, discursive and cognitive lines of differentiation and control.

In the wake of such an era of extensive and intensive proliferation of (im)material boundaries the draconian measures that have been taken to erect barriers and assert control over certain bodies gives rise to manifold and often brutal conflicts around the construction, enactment and contestation of spaces. Exclusionary practices span scales from the global to the local, down to lines of distinction inscribed upon the ‘geography closest in’ – the body.

In this light, this session seeks to ethnographically approach the dynamic practices of emplacement and displacement today, as well as illuminate the technologies and tactics permeating a multitude of current exclusionary policies and measures. We wish to identify today’s ‘undesirables’ –with a special focus on those found in urban settings– and foreground their narratives and lived experiences. As migrants, refugees, ‘Travelers’, people of color, the homeless, children, and the urban poor –among others- struggle to take space and make place for themselves under the pressures and paradoxes of uneven urban geographies, they claim the centre ground and threaten, even if imperceptibly, social hierarchies impinged on space.

Two questions thus emerge: what commonalities and shared logics can be revealed through the study of narratives and the lived experiences of people subjected to a range of different social and spatial exclusionary processes; and how do the everyday practices of various actors produce, reproduce, sustain or contest these contemporary exclusionary dynamics?

The session’s theme is designed to be inclusive enough to solicit a wide range of applicants. Researchers are invited to submit abstracts that broadly serve to feed into the discussion of narratives and lived experiences of social and spatial exclusions, such as, but not limited to:

- Narratives of emplacement and displacement
- Intersecting inequalities: Gender, class, ethnic, and spatial dynamics in cities that contribute to urban exclusion
- Contestations over place and space
- The sense of border between self and ‘other’
- (Im)material urban boundaries and frontiers
- Lived experiences of exclusion and marginalization
- Strategies and technologies of forced relocation
- The commodification and marketable representation of the urban poor and their spaces
- The growing dissociation between border functions and border locations
- The murky backside of gentrification
- Renovation and eviction processes
- Social categories/mechanisms by which inequalities are constituted, legitimized, questioned, and tackled in diverse societies
- Political subjectivity and contestation in urban settings.

Paper Submissions:
To submit a paper proposal, please submit the following, in the order listed below, all in a single Microsoft word file or pdf document, by Thursday October 15th 2015:

1. Applicant’s name, affiliation, and contact information.
2. Paper abstract of no more than 250 words.
3. Brief bio-sketch of 200-300 words.

Please email complete applications to Emil Pull at emil.pull@mah.se. Questions or clarifications prior to abstract submission should be directed to the same email address.

Successful applicants will be contacted by the 20th of October 2015 and will be expected to pay the registration fee and submit their abstracts online at the AAG website by October 29th 2015.

Books by Emil Pull

The original Sin: On displacement through renoviction in Sweden, 2020

This thesis is about renoviction – the process of evicting tenants through renovations, but more... more This thesis is about renoviction – the process of evicting tenants through renovations, but more generally, it is about displacement. The geographical context is the contemporary practice of renoviction in Sweden, generally, and in the municipality of Uppsala, specifically. The history of displacement in a Swedish context cannot be captured solely through the concept of renoviction however. Other mechanisms have also been primary drivers of displacement, so this thesis is not solely about renoviction but about displacements more generally. By highlighting displacement and the displaced, I hope to contribute to a radicalization of research that for long has focused on the middle-class experience of urbanism in studies on gentrification and beyond.

Housing Displacement. Conceptual and Methodological Issues, 2020

This book examines reasons, processes and consequences of housing displacement in different geogr... more This book examines reasons, processes and consequences of housing displacement in different geographical contexts. It explores displacement as a prime act of housing injustice – a central issue in urban injustices.
With international case studies from the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, India, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and Hungary, this book explores how housing displacement processes are more diverse and mutate into more new forms than have been acknowledged in the literature. It emphasizes a need to look beyond the existing rich gentrification literature to give primacy to researching processes of displacement to understand the socio-spatial change in the city. Although it is empirically and methodologically demanding for several reasons, studying displacement highlights gentrification’s unjust nature as well as the unjust housing policies in cities and neighborhoods that are simply not undergoing gentrification. The book also demonstrates how expulsion, though under-researched, has become a vital component of contemporary advanced capitalism, and how a focus on gentrification has hindered a potential focus on its flipside of ‘displacement’, as well as the study of the occurrence of poor cleansing from a long-term historical perspective.
This book offers interdisciplinary perspectives on housing displacement to academics and researchers in the fields of urban studies, housing, citizenship and migration studies interested in housing policies and governance practices at the urban scale.

En av samtidens största utmaningar är att ordna boende åt alla Sveriges invånare. Landet ska få h... more En av samtidens största utmaningar är att ordna boende åt alla Sveriges invånare. Landet ska få hundratusentals nya bostäder under den närmaste tioårsperioden. Debatten om hur det ska gå till blir alltmer laddad. Det planerade bostadsbyggandet är värt enorma summor och föga förvånande kan varje påstående ha en dold agenda.

Myter är berättelser som skapas av grupper i syfte att definiera sin identitet, genom gemensamma föreställningar och värderingar. Berättelserna ger ett ramverk för att förstå och rättfärdiga våra handlingar och världen vi lever i. Tillvaron blir uthärdlig och naturlig. Myten tränger undan andra berättelser och får dem att framstå som irrelevanta, felaktiga eller rent av dumma.
De som tjänar på bostadsmarknaden: politiker, mäklare, banker, arkitekter, byggföretag och hyresvärdar framställer således sin beskrivning om bostadsmarknaden som självklar:
Det anses oundvikligt att marknaden bestämmer; marknadspriser är ett neutralt fenomen; statliga regleringar stör den fria och goda marknaden; olika typer av regleringar kan till och med orsaka bostadsbristen eftersom marknaden annars skulle löst den; kraftig hyreshöjning efter renoveringar är oundviklig; individuellt ägande av bostäder är en god investering och smartare än att hyra; bostadssubventioner är något som tillhör det förgångna; migranter föredrar att bo i segregerade bostadsområden. Listan kan göras lång på sådana myter som egentligen handlar om något helt annat – särintressen. Myterna fyller dubbla roller, dels upprätthåller de status quo – allt är bra som det är när marknaden styr – dels uppmanar de till handling – fler avregleringar behövs.
I 13 myter om bostadsfrågan dissekerar den internationella forskargruppen CRUSH, The Critical Urban Sustainability Hub särintressenas myter om den pågående bostadskrisen. Boken etablerar en forskningsstödd diskurs som belyser bostadskrisen ur ett medborgarperspektiv. Essäerna bidrar med intellektuell eld och argument i diskussioner och debatter. Boken kan också läsas som ett rent nöje, eftersom den bygger ett nytt samtal om vårt boende.

Conference Presentations by Emil Pull

Nordic Geographers Meeting, Stockholm, June 18-21, 2017 Conveners: CRUSH – Critical Urban Sust... more Nordic Geographers Meeting, Stockholm, June 18-21, 2017

Conveners:

CRUSH – Critical Urban Sustainability Hub

Guy Baeten, Department of Urban Studies, Malmö University Carina Listerborn, Department of Urban Studies, Malmö University Maria Persdotter, Department of Urban Sstudies, Malmö University and Roskilde University Emil Pull, Department of Urban Studies, Malmö University and Roskilde University

Displacement is a catch-all term to capture processes through which households are forced to leave their home due to conditions that make continued occupancy impossible, hazardous and unaffordable. Displacement as a consequence of gentrification processes in 1980s New York was famously problematized and politicized by Chester Hartman et al. through their provocative publication “Displacement and how to fight it”. This original understanding of displacement is no longer adequate to capture today’s multiple manifestations of displacement. We invite papers that help us to rethink, reformulate and reconceptualise ‘displacement’ in all its contemporary guises to make it fit 21st century challenges. Since Hartman’s analysis, shifting housing policies, changing housing markets and economic conditions, new processes of migration and new forms of resistance, or large-scale renovation processes of the 1960s Swedish housing stock, are but a few examples of new important contexts that require more nuanced understandings of contemporary displacement processes. These understandings and conceptualizations also need to be framed beyond Anglo-American empirical evidence.

How can we enrich the existing conceptual apparatus to make sense of contemporary displacement processes, based on empirical research in different contexts? New concepts are surfacing: Roy (2016) proposes to speak of (racial) banishment in the aftermath of housing foreclosures in South Chicago, and Baeten and Listerborn (2015) suggest the concept of ‘city-less citizenship’ to describe processes of government-led indirect displacement processes in the south of Sweden. Are there other concepts to capture displacement today? What are the different manifestations of displacement in different places? How do we define displacement in the light of its contemporary varieties?

The aim of this session is to bring together researchers working in the fields of urban studies, housing, citizenship and migration studies to discuss exclusionary policies and governance practices at the urban scale, particularly in the field of housing.

Please submit abstracts of maximum 250 words to guy.baeten@mah.se by 15 December 2016

Instructions on how to submit abstracts can be found at http://www.humangeo.su.se/english/ngm-2017/dates/call-for-papers

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2020

Housing Displacement. Conceptual and Methodological Issues, 2020

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2020

This is a themed issue about displacements. Or more precisely, about research grounded in narrati... more This is a themed issue about displacements. Or more precisely, about research grounded in narratives of people suffering displacement in its various forms, and their all too visible and yet oftentimes made-invisible demographics. ‘All too visible’ as those individuals or groups stand out either as scapegoats on which to lay blame for urban problems, or as the human fallout of ongoing processes of class struggles and racialised conflicts under neoliberal, neocolonial and neonationalist regimes of spatial encroachment. Yet, their subjectivity, agency and voice are invisibilised in public and political discourse, as well as in academic research, or they are altogether erased through the poor selection of methodologies that fail to capture the discrete statistical categories that can register displacement. Therefore, those afflicted by it become un-researchable. The papers within this themed issue collectively seek to re- center displacement, through investigations and narratives of displaced populations.

ACME, 2020

*With apologies for possible cross-posting* Dear colleagues, Jacob Lind, Emil Pull and myse... more *With apologies for possible cross-posting*

Dear colleagues,

Paper Submissions:
To submit a paper proposal, please submit the following, in the order listed below, all in a single Microsoft word file or pdf document, by Thursday October 15th 2015:

1. Applicant’s name, affiliation, and contact information.
2. Paper abstract of no more than 250 words.
3. Brief bio-sketch of 200-300 words.

Please email complete applications to Emil Pull at emil.pull@mah.se. Questions or clarifications prior to abstract submission should be directed to the same email address.

Successful applicants will be contacted by the 20th of October 2015 and will be expected to pay the registration fee and submit their abstracts online at the AAG website by October 29th 2015.

The original Sin: On displacement through renoviction in Sweden, 2020

Housing Displacement. Conceptual and Methodological Issues, 2020

Nordic Geographers Meeting, Stockholm, June 18-21, 2017 Conveners: CRUSH – Critical Urban Sust... more Nordic Geographers Meeting, Stockholm, June 18-21, 2017

Conveners:

CRUSH – Critical Urban Sustainability Hub

Please submit abstracts of maximum 250 words to guy.baeten@mah.se by 15 December 2016

Instructions on how to submit abstracts can be found at http://www.humangeo.su.se/english/ngm-2017/dates/call-for-papers