Affective Placemaking: Unpacking the Relational and Emotional Dynamics of Urban Coexistence

Abstract

In this chapter, we introduce the concept of affective placemaking to examine how emotions, memories, everyday interactions, as well as local, national, and global dynamics, shape the meanings of place. With this concept, we challenge the formal understanding of placemaking that treats places as static entities with an imagined identity shared by community members. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s theorization of affect and Doreen Massey’s relational view of place, we suggest that people’s affective orientations towards places and other people are in a constant state of flux. Based on urban ethnography, narrative walks, and affective mapping conducted in two suburban neighbourhoods in southern Stockholm – Rågsved and Farsta – we identify three interwoven threads of affective placemaking that reveal how residents negotiate contested narratives and socio-spatial inequalities through affective orientations towards place and people. We argue that these orientations, or push-and-pull effects as we call them, play a significant role in building communal ties, sense of belonging, and place attachment as well as detachment, alienation, and exclusion. Together, these threads show that emotional geographies are central to urban coexistence, underscoring the need for planning practices that recognize lived experiences, spatial agency, and the affective dimensions of coexistence.