An industrial city on the outskirts of Stockholm, Södertälje is
the global capital of the Syriac Orthodox Christian diaspora, an
ethnic and religious minority group fleeing persecution and
discrimination in the Middle East. Since the 1960s, this Syriac
community has transformed the standardized welfare state spaces of
the city’s neighborhoods into its own “Mesopotälje,” defined
by houses with Mediterranean and other international influences, a
major soccer stadium, and massive churches and social clubs. Such
projects have challenged principles of Swedish utopian architecture
and planning that explicitly emphasized the erasure of difference.
In The Construction of Equality, Jennifer Mack shows how
Syriac-instigated architectural projects and spatial practices have
altered the city’s built environment “from below,” offering a
fresh perspective on segregation in the European modernist suburbs.
Combining architectural, urban, and ethnographic tools through
archival research, site work, participant observation (among
residents, designers, and planners), and interviews, Mack provides
a unique take on urban development, social change, and the
immigrant experience in Europe over a fifty-year period. Her book
shows how the transformation of space at the urban scale—the
creation and evolution of commercial and social districts, for
example—operates through the slow accumulation of architectural
projects. As Mack demonstrates, these developments are not merely
the result of the grassroots social practices usually attributed to
immigrants but instead are officially approved through dialogues
between residents and design professionals: accredited architects,
urban planners, and civic bureaucrats. Mack attends to the tensions
between the “enclavization” practices of a historically
persecuted minority group, the integration policies of the Swedish
welfare state and its planners, and European nativism.
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