Bound to Move: White Middle-Class Women’s Mobility in a Segregated City

Abstract: People’s everyday movements across the urban space matter. Indeed, for city planners looking to counter urban segregation processes, the issue of physical mobility is of prime concern as it bears the potential of overcoming ethnic and socio-economic divisions in the city. Yet, there is a lack of academic research matching this interest. In examining the role of mobility and the white middle-class in opposing or reproducing urban socio-spatial divisions, this thesis investigates two traditionally overlooked aspects within studies on urban segregation. More precisely, it explores young, white, middle-class women’s leisure mobility in the urban space. In so doing, this thesis provides insights that will help in planning for socially cohesive cities. Based on qualitative research with a group of women living in Malmö, Sweden, this thesis uses cultural analysis in considering the underlying motivations the women have to initiate mobility, the setting in which they choose to undertake these practices and the cultural conceptions that shape and are shaped by these decisions. Furthermore, by scrutinising how the women’s mobility in and outside of their own stigmatised neighbourhood shapes their relations to the area and its residents, a micro-perspective of segregation is developed. The study observes that the women’s mobility both influences and is influenced by segregation processes. While productive, social and aesthetic needs motivate the women to move, segregation happens as a consequence of the wish to tailor their own urban experience. This serves to bound the women’s mobility to limited areas perceived to be their natural setting. However, understandings like these are affected by the already existing segregation of those spaces, which thus obscures large parts of the city to the women. Moreover, the women use their mobility to both distance and connect their neighbourhood to other urban areas. Journeying through the city, the women’s class, gender and whiteness travel with them, shifting in importance and acting as sources of both privilege and oppression.