The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and the Swedish City by Jennifer Mack (review)

In The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and the Swedish City, Jennifer Mack looks at the spatial practices of the Syriac community in Södertälje—a Swedish industrial city located at the outskirts of Stockholm—and how its diasporic engagement in architecture and urban design has contributed to changing the face of the city.¹ In response to the increasingly dystopian vision of the growing multicultural areas in contemporary Sweden, Mack emphasizes the everyday actions of a community in matters of decoration and urban design as a means of expressing its identity.

Combining an ethnographic method with historical reflections and considerations of design in the built environment, Mack revisits a series of contradictions within Swedish urban planning and national housing programs over a forty-year period. Through the study of Syriac community development in Södertälje, the author criticizes the normative approach in urban design. She demonstrates how this approach gives rise to oppositions between the Swedish universalist model, with its vision of a classless society, and the particularism and social differentiation of the Syriac diaspora; between the Swedish integration policy of dispersion and the ethnic clusters created by the Syriac community.

Mack argues that the urban programs and housing policy that were developed from the 1930s to the 1960s contributed to the creation of “a national identity” (243) diffused through a set of public instruments and standards, including detaljplaner (zoning plans), building permits, and housing standards. Her general thesis is that the construction of equality in Swedish urban politics becomes a politics of sameness. In this context, the growth of Syriac enclaves became a source of distress for the urban planners of Södertälje when local and national media coverage gave the city the reputation of being an invandrarstadad (immigrant city). Through the lens of an alleged “urban crisis,” Swedish political parties and media abusively focused on immigrant employment, overcrowded apartments, organized crime, and low-quality education at school, thereby feeding conservative and xenophobic discourses.

Through the key concept “Urban Design from Below,” Mack analyzes a reversal in planning and urban design. She brings to light new forms of interactive planning in Södertälje that she defines as “a flexible postmodern praxis” (12). In particular, Mack shows that the practices of various Syriac groups are conducive to developing a new form of public space. The Syriacs become “visible” in the city when “new signs and color schemes, symbols, markers and physical displays” gradually alter the city center (83). In fact, neoliberal urban planning had a paradoxical result in this context, in that “the state’s attention to private investors generated new space-making opportunities for immigrants” (11). In several ways, the Syriac community has created its own physical space and, by extension, a new form of planning in Södertälje. The notion of “Urban Design from Below” relates to the art of negotiating cultural intimacy in public space. Against the homogeneity of Swedish housing standards and urban policy, the construction of several Syriac orthodox churches and, later, the development of the Syriac design in single-family houses provide “significant ritual moments linking community, family, and religion” (16).

Analyzing Södertälje as a “Syriac diasporic capital” through Bourdieu’s concept of “distinction,” Mack presents how the Syriacs intend to showcase their class position. In Sweden, one of the world’s most gender-equal societies, the “diasporic space” of the Syriacs appears as a space of distinction, in that it deviates from the common view of “classless (but stigmatized) Million Program dwellings” (12). Syriac building projects—construction of churches, social clubs, football clubs, and later the development of TV programs—challenge national urban policy. In particular, the early development of the “Syriac capital,” described as a process of ethnic “enclavization” (49), contrasts with the Swedish social imaginary, deeply rooted in the...