The Stockholm Municipality has set inclusion at the core of its objectives for the city with its “Vision 2040: A Stockholm for Everyone”. Acknowledging the divide between neighborhoods, the government has brought forward social sustainability as a key component to improve the fast- growing city. This research focuses on three of the most stigmatized neighborhoods of Stockholm: Rinkeby, Tensta, and Husby, where residents are predominantly of foreign background, to offer an alternative way of understanding inclusion. Specifically, this study looks into the public spaces at the center of these three neighborhoods in a comparative analysis of public life. The collaborative project presented here shows the importance of these centrums in supporting community life in the suburbs. Drawing from Setha Low’s research on public squares in Costa Rica, the following work suggest public space is not only produced by those who envision it, but also constructed by those who use it, through daily processes, behaviors, and habits. These observed patterns carry significance as they forge the character of a place, and address practices and emotions within a collective identity. The thesis puts emphasis on the dynamic nature of public space, the relationship between morphology and use, and the potential neighborhood centers have for becoming hubs of inclusion.

During the New Deal, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) developed what is arguably one of the most provocative and far-reaching programs for farm workers undertaken by the U.S. federal government to date. Through the Migratory Labor Camp Program the FSA promised to efficiently funnel workers to fulfill the agricultural industry’s labor demands while providing migrants modern, up-to-date housing and services to alleviate the well-documented substandard conditions many faced. Most scholars have analyzed the camps primarily as sites of labor, capital, and state regulation. Rather than view the camp program as simply a government effort to more efficiently coordinate the nation’s farm labor market, this study argues that the services, programs, and activities FSA officials administered in the camps sought to regulate and transform significant and often intimate social and cultural aspects of migrants’ daily lives. By examining the role of the camps’ architecture, medical clinics, nurseries and elementary schools, as well as the “self-governing” camp committees and councils, this dissertation engages in a gendered analysis of labor to reveal how the federal camps were unique dual-purpose domestic and labor spaces. Analyzing the camps as simultaneous productive and reproductive sites allows us to see them as part of a contested terrain in which complex issues of identity, community, citizenship, and labor were negotiated on a daily basis, affecting U.S. farm labor and race relations well beyond the perimeters of the federal camps. / text