The Management of Spatial Order

Sammanfattning: In recent years, people using public space in ways that are seen as problematic has been a recurring topic of public debate – for example about begging EU-migrants and marginalized youth causing unrest in shopping malls. This study sets out to understand how government responds to in such cases. By analyzing interviews with social workers, policy documents and secondary reports about efforts to manage the use of public space, I derive two regimes of government. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s work on government and Doreen Massey’s analysis of the politics of space, I show that these regimes entail (i) understandings of the appearance of certain groups at certain places as problems, (ii) technologies that answer to these, and (iii) implicit conceptions of space that underpin the relationship between problematization and response. I call the first regime the narrowing of space, as it delimits the spatial accessibility to urban public space for certain groups. The second regime is called governmentality of space, as it sets out to motivate people to voluntarily use urban public space differently. Drawing on the empirical descriptions of these, I argue that they are both characterized by how they conceptualize space and, more generally, that the linkages between government and spatiality is key to make sense of the management of spatial order.