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Dark Matter, White Space

This thesis addresses the ambiguous role of Malmö’s latest megaproject in the context of the city’s racializing urban development trajectory. The project is a public/private congress center, concert hall and hotel complex called Malmö Live. Malmö Live is problematized as the height of spectacle and challenge as it is expected to be the city’s most prominent cultural and social meeting place. The inquiry is directed to how its expectation of relevancy came about and utilizes a Foucauldian inspired genealogical methodology. The result stems from an investigation of the historical, present, local and global conditions that constitutes the expectancy of its relevancy. The investigation notes the divisiveness of tourism and how it affects ways of thinking and doing government on multiple scales, and in particular how it motivates the case in question. The result shows that there are affinities between tourism- during-colonialism and the contemporary tourism industry. Where the former was appropriated by colonialism and overtly racializing, the latter is allowed appropriacy by a currency ascribed to selected geographies and histories. By describing the becoming of this megaproject and the use of tourism knowledge and technology, the how-question about the expectation of Malmö Live’s relevancy leads to a genealogical reconstruction of Malmö Live as a wager on whiteness. The wager on whiteness hold no guarantees, but the power of it is the ability to be persuasive and believed, and the currency it holds for those who perform it. The thesis ends with a discussion on what is at stake with Malmö Live, i.e. Malmö’s whiteness.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:mau-21571
Date January 2019
CreatorsMussie, Ezana
PublisherMalmö universitet, Fakulteten för kultur och samhälle (KS), Malmö universitet/Kultur och samhälle
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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