Technical developments, social reforms, economic possibilities, and growing populations increasingly pushed and pulled people across the globe in the nineteenth century. Crossing multiple national borders, in search for a new home, migrants moving to the same city oftentimes gathered together. Memories of urban districts, defined by inhabitants from ethnic or ...
(Show more)Technical developments, social reforms, economic possibilities, and growing populations increasingly pushed and pulled people across the globe in the nineteenth century. Crossing multiple national borders, in search for a new home, migrants moving to the same city oftentimes gathered together. Memories of urban districts, defined by inhabitants from ethnic or religious minorities, are still vibrant, such as Jewish East End in London, or Irish Hell’s Kitchen in New York. But explorations of emotional practices reveal a discrepancy between the image of urban, migrant districts, and the migrants’ everyday experiences of the same districts.
Using the district of Södermalm in Stockholm as a case study, this paper analyses the role of emotions in constructing the contemporary, and today’s prevailing, idea that poor, Orthodox, and Eastern European Jews belonged to the slum and industrial suburb. With help from GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and quantitative analysis of Jewish residences, I propose that the digital methodology reveals an everyday spatial framework that diverges from narratives of Jewish Södermalm found in newspaper articles, oral interviews, and private letters. It is in this gap, between spatial practice and spatial representation, that we can understand the power of emotions in producing and reproducing long-lasting and influential tropes about migrants and the urban districts they settled in. This paper’s exploration of the Jewish community in Stockholm’s residential patterns and internal communication reveals the spatial inscription of emotionally driven power relations in migration groups moving to new urban settings in the twentieth century, as well as the possibilities of quantitative sources and digital methodology in understanding emotional practices in urban space.
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