Mediating Cityscapes: Cultural Analysis and The Development of Urban Places

Abstract: Helsingborg, a coastal city in southern Sweden, has initiated a twenty-five yearlong re-development project called H+, aiming to convert the southern industrial harbor space into a new, livable urban neighborhood and city center. The winning plan for the H+ project, titled ‘The Tolerant City,’ is an inherently social redevelopment that requires innovative and collaborative strategies, as well as a strong focus on social sustainability, to achieve. As a cultural analyst working with the City of Helsingborg (Helsingborgs stad) and the H+ Project, my role has been to mediate information between planners and citizens, focusing the project’s visions towards existing communities and their values. This thesis develops how ethnographic research and cultural mapping engages with and revitalizes city planning to enable the development of a ‘tolerant city,’ essentially a process of place-making the southern harbor. Cultural mapping translates ethnographic data into usable maps for city planners, used here as a methodological tool in the process of developing the H+ area as a physical and non-physical place. This thesis examines the ways in which an applied cultural analytical approach engenders planning practices towards openness and inclusion through deeper understandings of the dialectic identities emerging from the relationships between people and places.