Disguised Vacancy: exploring urban second home dwelling in Stockholm and London

Sammanfattning: The aim of the thesis is to comparatively analyse the phenomenon of urban second home dwelling in cities with a housing shortage. Due to the limited exploartion of the phenomenon, the methods used to research urban second home dwelling are inspired by constructivist grounded theory. The study has been conducted through two case studies in Stockholm and London during the spring of 2015. Stockholm, which is this study's main case, contains in-depth interviews and a small-scale analysis of Gamla Stan based on telephone inteviews with 28 participants. The case of London is based on a ten-days field study with in-depth interviews, observations, and document analysis. Questions of interrelations, experience, consequences, place-specific use and practice have been explored through using theories of dwelling and Urry's concepts of consuming place and cultural desire (1995). The results from the collected research emphasise a theoretical discussion of privilege actors doing urban second home dwelling. The dwelling practices are bound to place-specific desires and urban second home dwellers become enhancers by accentuatuing the present processes in the city whilst disgusing the under-occupation of housing.