This Open Access book examines how youths in Malmö’s Rosengård district navigate life in the shadow of urban violence and enduring stigma. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it explores the imaginaries and lived social experience around Sweden’s problematised urban areas and how stigmatising labels, such as “no-go zones”, are co-produced through media narratives, architectural design, and policy discourse. Rather than focusing on victims or perpetrators, the book foregrounds the everyday realities and political agency of youth in one of Europe’s most stigmatised urban areas. It argues that these young people are active agents of democratic life and reframes how we understand contemporary urban life, inequality, and youth politics within stable democracies. Combining urban sociology, critical race studies, and ethnographic methods, this book provides a nuanced, intersectional, and anti-racist account of life in the proximity of violence and stigma, and of the creative, collective strategies that emerge in response.

Katharina Wuropulos is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bergen, Norway