Textures of diversity: Socio-material arrangements, atmosphere, and social inclusion in a multi-ethnic neighbourhood

Abstract

Research within literatures on multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism has moved beyond studying the institutional basis and discursive negotiations of differences towards an understanding of the embodied and practical dimensions of everyday social interactions. An emergent literature has also started to consider the role of vibrant material agents, atmosphere, and their environmental contexts in understanding diversity spaces. We wish to contribute to this literature through a visual and material ethnographic approach, taking two cafes in Copenhagen, Denmark as emblematic cases. We locate these sites in the particular socio-cultural space of Nørrebro – a neighbourhood characterised by the ethnic diversity of its inhabitants, but also by political tensions, government-supported gentrification, and community-driven restructuring and rebuilding. Taking an ecological approach to these spaces, we argue that socio-material arrangements may serve to solve or express diversity through the aesthetic organisation of human and non-human actors. We interpret such material forms as co-constitutive agents of diversity politics.

Looking Beyond Interaction: Exploring Meaning-Making Through the Windows of an Art Gallery

“…Firstly, I have modelled what a meaning-centered sociology of the art gallery that "looks beyond interpretation" might be. The alternative approach I have taken in is deeply textural (de la Fuente, 2019), an approach that is beginning to emerge in empirical studies of social life, such as Amsterdam's café culture (Kuruoğlu and Woodward, 2021). This approach lends itself particularly well to the study of art and its places, especially those works and places that tend to distort and exceed conventional modes of meaning making while appealing to aesthetic and sensual experience.…”

Looking beyond interaction: exploring meaning making through the windows of an art gallery

“…Firstly, I have modeled what a meaning-centered sociology of the art gallery that “looks beyond interpretation” might be. The alternative approach I have taken in is deeply textural (de la Fuente 2019 ), an approach that is beginning to emerge in empirical studies of social life, such as Amsterdam’s café culture (Kuruoğlu and Woodward 2021 ). This approach lends itself particularly well to the study of art and its places, especially those works and places that tend to distort and exceed conventional modes of meaning making while appealing to aesthetic and sensual experience.…”

Affective atmospheres of gentrification: Wellbeing amid neighbourhood change

“…The articles dealing with the impacts of gentrification and regeneration on the local community within a single neighbourhood (Butcher, 2019;Butcher & Dickens, 2016;Linz, 2017;Paiva & Sánchez-Fuarros, 2021;Yarker, 2018) are complemented by: a more focused, comparative study of two cafes within a gentrifying neighbourhood (Kuruoğlu & Woodward, 2021); an analysis of atmospheric engineering performed by the architecture of commercial spaces (Kindynis, 2021); a study of atmospheres emerging in a neighbourhood under intensive construction (Marotta & Cummings, 2019); a study of the impacts of a city's metropolitan area expansion on a neighbourhood (Paiva, 2016); a study of the impacts of introducing private security policing in a crime-ridden neighbourhood (Mosselson, 2019). Additionally, I have decided to include a theoretical article (Andrews & Duff, 2020) which accurately complements the selected empirical studies by more explicitly emphasising the connection between spatial, territorialised atmospheric production and broader, non-material socioeconomic processes.…”

“…New craft-beer pubs and restaurants, which contrast with the deteriorated spaces of the neighbourhood, attract certain groups of clients, simultaneously excluding others, thus creating new visible assemblages of people which reinforce social categories of race and class. Kuruoğlu and Woodward (2021) similarly emphasise the significance of material textures of social spaces. Comparing two cafes in a gentrifying neighbourhood of Copenhagen, they mobilise the concept of affordance-"a relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent that determine just how the object could possibly be used" (Ahmed, 2019, p. 59)-to show how the material composition of one cafe fosters an inclusive atmosphere, encouraging sociable interactions between ethnically diverse individuals, while the other, replicating a minimalistic tourist aesthetic and emphasising artisanal coffee preparation as its trade mark, creates an atmosphere which renders local, ethnically diverse residents unwelcome.…”