1. Introduction
It is a well-known fact that social processes such as spatial segregation, subsequent policies and media coverage stigmatize specific places and discredit their already marginalized residents [
1,
2]. Recent Swedish studies [
3,
4,
5,
6,
7] focusing on cities outside of Stockholm confirmed the ubiquity of spatial segregation. Their findings suggest that the stigmatization of poor places is widespread [
8]. They also suggest that the stigma may be associated with public perception. However, these studies cannot tell us in which ways stigma is “an obstacle on the path to civic participation” [
9]. This article’s contribution is embedded in its ambition to fill this gap in international research.
By now, citizen science is a proven and well-established method for collecting data concerning the UN’s seventeen sustainable development goals (SDGs). From a search of citizen-science-related articles published in the Sustainability journal between 2020 and 2021, it is obvious that most pertain to good health and well-being (SDG 3), quality education (SDG 4), clean water and sanitation (SDG 6), affordable and clean energy (SDG 7) and life on land (SDG 15) [
10,
11,
12,
13,
14,
15]. Despite this extensive use of the citizen science method, it is, with SDG 11 (Sustainable cities and communities) in mind, seldom applied to penetrate the social and physical boundaries of stigmatized places. Thus, the stigma of place is considered herein to be a barrier in the way of achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11.
With this in mind, there is a need to test new methods that include the perceptions of marginalized and politically disenfranchised residents. In particular, the article connects to the work by Doron [
16] and Crang [
17], which contrasted photography and interview as a means of investigating stigmatized places. In this Swedish case, the focus was on empowering young, marginalized males as citizens to capture, through the lens of their smartphones, how they perceive the neighborhoods in which they live. Using Wacquant’s [
18] definition of “urban outcasts”, these young males are portrayed as dispossessed and deprived metropolitans [
19], living in a contradiction between their social reality and public perception [
18]. As citizen scientists, however, these individuals have the opportunity to supply knowledge to the research community that allows them to inform politicians and other concerned actors on how to bridge the outside–inside neighborhood perception gap. By depicting their neighborhoods’ social and physical contexts, young urban outcasts have a voice [
20]. In fact, citizen scientists often report that they feel more a part of their communities in terms of social engagement and participation [
5]. In essence, this “view from within” is applied in this article as a counter perspective to a negative media-based public perception. The citizen science method has been shown to have the advantage of spreading civic culture, bringing otherwise invisible issues into the light of day and empowering, via representation, an otherwise politically weak community [
21]. From this situation of inclusive citizenship, researchers and citizen scientists can address the United Nations’ SDG 11. The point of this approach is that citizen scientists should be involved without having the researchers advocate for them.
However, countering the massively negative picture of stigmatized places among outsiders not living in those places, such as many politicians, are “calls for the voices of the marginalized to be heard in policy making” [
22] (p. 53). This was one of the aims of the Neighbourhood Sustainable Lifestyle and Activity (NESLA) project (2018–2020), which had a particular focus on letting local youths identify the facilitators and barriers in the way of their health, lifestyles and sense of safety. In particular, young male residents were engaged to depict two stigmatized places, Fröslunda and Skiftinge, from within.
Contributing to the production of territorial stigmatization [
19], The Swedish police [
23] annually identifies and sorts Sweden’s 60 most deprived neighborhoods into one of three special status categories. Being categorized as either “deprived” [
24], “at risk” [
4] or “specially deprived” [
25] is telling the world that these places are characterized by specific negative neighborhood effects such as a low socioeconomic status (SES), high exposure to gang-related criminality and (religious as well as nationalist) radicalization [
2,
25]. Specially deprived places are on a trajectory to becoming what are sometimes viewed by the police as “no-go zones” [
23].
In this context, and in line with Wacquant and his colleagues, “special cases” such as Stockholm’s Rinkeby, Tensta and Fittja are viewed as anti-ghettos, that is, poor, multi-ethnic and culturally fragmented places [
8]. The two stigmatized neighborhoods in focus here are Skiftinge and Fröslunda in the middle-sized city of Eskilstuna. Both have deprived status, are anti-ghettos, are home to urban outcasts and constitute a large part of the city’s urban periphery (see
Figure 1). Here gangs of young males and their criminality add to an already negative media picture and public perception of these neighborhoods, prompting officials to implement draconian measures. For instance, the political majority in the city of Eskilstuna state that:
Young men who, instead of taking advantage of the opportunity to study, work and live a good life, choose to sell drugs, or challenge the municipality’s monopoly on violence will face the full force of the law. If they need to be locked up, so be it. However, if they want to choose a new path and return to society, they are welcome back
Thus, the point this article alludes to is that the media, police, politicians and other outsiders often paint an unfair and stigmatizing picture of poor places, without nuances, possibly ignoring otherwise important positive aspects of their social and physical contexts.
The aim of this article is twofold. First, extrapolating on the NESLA project’s findings, the potential of resident depiction as a citizen science method and as a means to describe the social and physical reality of a stigmatized place “from within” is probed, that is, whether this method adds to or confirms the public perception of these so-called deprived neighborhoods. Second, against the background of a city-wide negative media image, and based on this synthesis of outside versus inside perspectives, an otherwise absent synergy is created between citizen science and territorial stigmatization where the attributes of place are weighed against its residents’ ability to engage in and sustain their community. Moreover, their perceptions of the social and physical context that influences their lives are transmitted by researchers (the authors) to outside actors such as politicians, bureaucrats, colleagues and the media. Arguably, the methodological strength of this approach is that it contributes to reducing the imbalance between theoretical and empirical work in the field.
1.1. Eskilstuna and Its Stigmatized Neighborhoods
The city of Eskilstuna is an archetypical middle-sized city in Sweden but deviates in two ways: first, it is home to several stigmatized neighborhoods where a majority of residents (63%) have a foreign background (
Table 1), which, second, correlates with the fact that 26% of the city’s denizens are foreign-born [
27]. The municipality spans 1250 km
2 located between two of Sweden’s largest lakes, Lake Mälaren and Lake Hjälmaren. To the east, Lake Mälaren connects to the Baltic Sea through the Swedish capital, Stockholm, which is located about 100 km to the east. The biggest city in the municipality, with about two-thirds of the municipality’s 100,000 inhabitants, is also named Eskilstuna.
Built between 1965 and 1974 and having a high priority in Swedish housing politics at the time, both the Fröslunda and Skiftinge suburbs were part of the Swedish “million homes programme” (MHP). The program’s political aim was to eradicate overcrowded households. As a result, and until the mid-1990s, a lot of suburbs had no green areas and many buildings and apartments were substandard [
28]. Since the neoliberalization of the Swedish housing market in the mid-1990s, and evident in their deprived status [
23], the SES of households in Fröslunda and Skiftinge, like many other MHP neighborhoods, has declined considerably.
1.2. Depicting Two Swedish City Suburbs
When we compare SES, communities in both ethnically diverse places appear similar (
Table 1). Once a model MHP neighborhood (see
Figure 2), Fröslunda, with 7600 inhabitants, is the larger of the two (
Table 1) and can be found directly south of the city center (Centrum in
Figure 1).
Fröslunda borders another of the city’s “deprived” neighborhoods (Lagersberg) and an old industrial zone (Vilsta). Until the end of the 1990s, it was known for being home to a majority of Eskilstuna’s Finnish community, one of the biggest outside of Finland and Stockholm.
Today, residents of Fröslunda come mostly from Somalia or Syria and have, as of yet, little political influence in terms of legal citizenship and under-average participation (Table 2). While the Fröslunda neighborhood and its center have not changed physically (
Figure 2), its local commerce, however, has deteriorated dramatically.
In line with the general “white flight” process in Sweden, most of the neighborhood’s Finnish and Swedish residents have moved out and with them many old businesses, including a florist, café, pizzeria and the local supermarket. One reason for this is evident in the caption of
Figure 3, which portrays a typical scene in Fröslunda in 2019. In this case, it captures police disrupting drug dealing in the civic center near the “soon to be closed” supermarket. The local youth club, a focal point in our study, is in a school building close by. Now, two years later (2021), giant blue placards have replaced shop signs, proclaiming plans for the renewal of the neighborhood (
Figure 4). This kind of project is a contradiction in terms. On the one hand, it is well-meaning. On the other, it symbolizes a sublime reinforcement of the stigma of place, that is, current negative public perception of Fröslunda as an unsafe and hostile place.
On the opposite side of the city and north of the E20 highway (
Figure 1), Skiftinge with its ca. 5000 residents has the same deprived status as Fröslunda. Its community deviates from that of Fröslunda in the sense that it has lived longer in Sweden, is predominantly Middle Eastern and has a higher proportion of legalized citizens (Table 2). It also boasts a popular hypermarket. However, Skiftinge’s civic center, with a small shop, pizzeria and a youth club called Palatzet, the second focal point of this research, is smaller than Fröslunda’s and more enclosed. Also, a product of the MHP, it is surrounded by high-rise buildings (
Figure 5).
The pictures in
Figure 2,
Figure 3,
Figure 4 and
Figure 5 were taken by the NESLA research group and display a typical view of two territorially stigmatized Swedish city suburb neighborhoods as often experienced by passers-by, or as portrayed in the media. It is against the background of this common public image that urban youths are given the possibility as citizen scientists to depict their neighborhood.
1.3. Theoretical Implications of Citizen Science
One key point of the citizen science method applied in this article is that the observations and impressions of people at a given place matter just as much as what is said in statistics about material and social facts that constitute the usual kinds of social-science-based analysis and mapping. This is taken into account when addressing the theoretical implications of citizen science in territorially stigmatized places. Larsen and Delica [
19] (p. 542) defined territorial stigmatization “quite simply as a negative public image of specific places, which enforces a symbolic dispossession of their inhabitants, which in turn not only recasts them as social or urban outcasts but also deprives them of their collective representation and identity.” Jensen and Christensen [
24] (p. 77), referring particularly to the Swedish context, defined territorial stigmatization as “… social and media discourses which demonize the terms of living in a way that causes fear and insecurity both internally and outside of these areas”. Although most Swedes will never visit Stockholm’s most infamous places, those “living in the country’s remotest villages recoil in fear and loathing at the mere mention of Rinkeby, Tensta and Fittja” [
8] (p. 1273). The implication for citizen science is that the young males recruited as citizen scientists are urban outcasts, that is, not just deprived of social mobility, representation and identity but also feared and demonized in the media. From this, a second key point is that it is not just local facts and impressions that account for the directions of policy making and planning but even the image that is co-produced by various media such as a local newspaper.
There are two schools of thought regarding the consequences of territorial stigmatization. The first maintains that urban outcasts are resigned to social degradation, while the second maintains that urban outcasts are aware of and resist it [
24]. Irrespective of these consequences, citizen science can potentially give the “urban outcast” a voice, overcoming a lack of a collective identity, resignation [
18] and weak citizenship (Table 2). Thus, visualizing these places from within, that is, from the perspective of the urban outcast, is a way to challenge, confirm and/or appease adverse public perceptions concerning the image of Eskilstuna’s urban periphery. In line with the focus of the UN’s SDG 11, citizen science is also a way to circumvent the obstacles in the way of setting the stage for practical solution building. Two territorially stigmatized places (anti-ghettos) were identified where young urban outcasts’ citizenship, that is, living in a particular locale without regard to legal status, can be activated by having them share, through photo taking and audio-narratives, their physical and social realities.
Two strands in citizenship theory have implications for citizen science (see, among others, [
20,
22,
29,
30,
31]). The oldest implies that citizen science is conducted in places where the discrimination and marginalization of their residents is normalized [
29,
31]. The more recent strand adds to the first by highlighting the fact that the marginalization of citizen scientists, their families and community is also a consequence of exclusive legal citizenship rules [
22,
30,
32,
33,
34]. Citizen science can help to bypass the problems identified in both strands by empowering residents to document their immediate surroundings. Subsequently, researchers can gain knowledge from young urban outcasts’ pictorial documentation that can begin to counteract their family’s and community’s lack of influence in local politics (Table 2).
However, in ethnically diverse neighborhoods, it is noteworthy that the image of a “close-knit community life among the poor is romantic”, according to Putnam [
35] (p. 207), “since this group tends to be socially isolated, even from its neighbours”. Wacquant [
18] (p. 116) explains why:
In response to spatial defamation, residents engage in strategies of mutual distancing and lateral denigration; they retreat into the private sphere of the family; and they exit from the neighbourhood (whenever they have the option).
A Danish study of the Aalborg East neighborhood [
24], and suggestive of a pride of place [
32], suggested that potential citizen scientists from either Fröslunda or Skiftinge will either feel “sadness and anger” or “shame and guilt” with which Wacquant [
18] associated spatial defamation. Irrespective of their driving force, it can be argued that small groups of resident citizen scientists can overcome this social isolation barrier [
36] and visualize the context of their neighborhood. Because territorial stigmatization has deprived citizen scientists of collective representation and identity [
19], the NESLA project’s aim was to empower young urban males living in these under-resourced communities to portray both the positive and negative attributes of those aspects of their social and physical realities. From this, and by adding a media- and politics-based public perception element, we can determine if the claim of fear and prejudice is warranted.
2. Choice of Citizen Science Technique for Data Collection
This version of citizen science (see below) applied here gathers data in a unique way. First, it only requires a small number of active participants (ca. 10–12), which is typically sufficient to paint a picture of their neighborhood [
21]. Second, it applies the latest and now widely available technologies (smartphones) and digital tools (apps), allowing easy and smooth access to otherwise difficult to obtain data. In the present study, young males (between 16 and 18 years of age) were instructed to install the mobile app called the Stanford Healthy Neighborhood Discovery Tool (Discovery Tool for short) on their smartphones, go for a walk in their neighborhood, take pictures and record audio narratives regarding the different features of the local environment that they portray in their pictures.
Inspired by Winter, Goldman Rosas, et al. [
21] and similar projects comprising Stanford University’s Our Voice Global Citizen Science Research Initiative [
37], the Neighborhood Sustainable Lifestyle and Health among Adolescents (NESLA) study applied the following modus operandi:
Using the Discovery Tool, young males collected data consisting of their self-rated community influence, barriers and facilitators that they perceived lead to either a bad or a good social and physical context, as well as their reflections on the collected data. Thereafter, all photos were reviewed together with a project researcher where the citizen scientists had the opportunity to reflect on their documentation and share additional information for 10–30 min (September to December 2018).
Researchers analyzed the data and categorized it collectively (January to March 2019).
Researchers arranged a “citizen science poster presentation” at Mälardalen University’s annual Political Science Day on the 8 April in 2019. They also presented citizen scientists’ pictures to local politicians and bureaucrats in the local government’s Special Committee on Segregation on the 7 May 2019 as a basis for a dialogue on how to improve the situation of residents in Fröslunda and Skiftinge.
In initiating this work, the authors contacted leaders at local youth clubs in four neighborhoods in two middle-sized cities (Fröslunda and Skiftinge in the city of Eskilstuna as well as Bäckby and Råby in the city of Västerås), gaining permission to visit them. The Västerås study [
5] also applied the citizen science method but focused instead on the relationship between neighborhood context and young residents’ (both male and female) physical activity.
The youth club in Sweden is neighborhood-based and opens weekdays at 1800 hrs. for local youths under 18 years, but it can also attract youths from adjacent neighborhoods. The youths were first reluctant to get involved; however, when we became the focus of the youth club leaders’ attention, they too became interested. A voucher to the local cinema proved to be a major incentive for recruitment. A total of 23 young males with a mean age of 16.6 (±1.03) years were recruited onsite at the local youth clubs in Fröslunda (11) and Skiftinge (12).
Eligibility criteria for participation included being between 16 and 18 years old and possessing a smartphone compatible with the Discovery Tool (i.e., iPhone 5, or later versions, or Android 2.3). The initial aim of the NESLA project was to include young males and females in the Eskilstuna study, but it became apparent that young females usually did not attend the youth club in Fröslunda, and the few young females present at the youth club in Skiftinge declined to take part in the study. This fact that young females could not be recruited is not downplayed here. The authors are aware that the focus of this citizen science activity will be less representative. For instance, it is conceivable that young men are more interested in sports (a unique and central point in the coming analysis) than young women are.
The information collected using the Discovery Tool app is innovative in as much as it includes geo-coded photographs and audio narratives, data on positive or negative attributes of the neighborhood (portrayed as a happy and sad smiley face in the app), GPS-tracked walking routes and an eight-item survey capturing citizen scientists’ age, gender, perceived health and education level as well as perceived level of influence in their community. In total, 117 photos were taken, and data signifying whether the photo was perceived as a positive or negative feature of the local environment were added to 91 of these. A review of all photos together with a project researcher where the citizen scientist had the opportunity to reflect on their documentation lasted for 10–30 min.
Photo and audio files were analyzed thematically by three researchers (T.F., T.R., B.G.B.). Audio files were transcribed verbatim, and additional comments that emerged during the group discussion between citizen scientists and researchers were manually transferred to electronic format. The researchers coded the raw data into main categories based on each photo’s theme and from keywords in associated audio files and written comments. If a recording included more than one element, it was coded into more than one category. The research group agreed on three social and eight physical elements.
As a means to the end of gaining a comparable outside perspective, the dominant city newspaper, Eskilstuna Kuriren, was selected to portray events in and around the citizen scientists’ neighborhoods. A total of 100 articles posted online over a nine-month period spanning between October 2020 and June 2021 were reviewed to gain a quick snapshot of the public’s perception of Skiftinge and Fröslunda.
4. Discussion and Conclusions
Previous Our Voice citizen science research conducted by Stanford University in collaboration with universities in other countries indicates that roughly 10–20 citizen scientists are sufficient to capture a neighborhood narrative and develop resident consensus around specific issues [
36,
63,
64]. Fulfilling this criterion, the authors tapped into a local knowledge base and “pride of place” [
32]. When considering the ethnic makeup of the young males recruited in the NESLA project, the superficial similarities of both their communities as depicted in
Table 1 quickly faded away. Citizen science on the small scale of this first-generation study may not capture fully the social relationships and cultural milieus of the community within which these young male urban outcasts live and interact [
65,
66]. It does, however, begin to paint a somewhat different picture of the neighborhood’s social reality that challenges public perceptions and can supply political and public health scientists as well as decision makers with new insights about the issues that matter for youths in marginalized local communities. Thus, citizen science is an excellent method for calibrating the focus of the UN’s SDG 11 to achieve more sustainable cities and communities.
The type of community engagement inspired by the citizen science method used in this study reached otherwise difficult to access groups and may be useful as a countermeasure to spatial defamation [
18]. It may also contribute to confirming, invalidating and/or appeasing public perception, that is, the views or prejudices of other “citizens, potential employers and bureaucrats” [
67]. Using this method, citizen scientists revealed that the main difference between both stigmatized places was that young males in Skiftinge were concerned more about their physical context than their counterparts in Fröslunda, where the overwhelming positive perception of shops, football courts, parks and playgrounds contrasts with a problematic social context. Also absent from young males’ accounts of Skiftinge was any reference to physical incivilities other than the usability of poorly illuminated bicycle lanes and other outdoor spaces. Public transport was not described as an issue in citizen scientists’ accounts of either place.
From this, the first conclusion is that the potential of resident visualization as a method of citizen science is evident when it adds to our knowledge of Skiftinge’s social reality, which is tainted by an ambivalent perception of some aspects of its physical context. Second, in Fröslunda, the Somali community’s ability to withstand negative public perception and territorial stigmatization is weakened by everything from older males’ crime, social incivilities, drug use and bullying to peer pressure. Third, the data suggest that a negative local context can be enriched to a certain extent by the further availability of, for instance, youth clubs, food stores, football fields and courts, street lighting and parks. All of these aspects are considered to be important attributes of residents’ social and physical reality but are seldom mentioned in the media or the city’s annual plans. Fourth, an overlap can be found between social reality and public perception from which it can be concluded that the negative “crime and drug” and positive “football and school” narratives portrayed in
Eskilstuna Kuriren and the local Swedish TV station are also evident in young males’ perceptions of their neighborhood. Thus, as citizen scientists, these young urban males confirm these aspects of public perception. It is noteworthy that current public perception implies that Fröslunda and Skiftinge are now vulnerable to being cordoned off by the police [
18] or being actively devalued further “in order to redevelop, gentrify, or privatize public housing or land” [
19]. This is partly evident in the most recent annual plan (2021) for Eskilstuna where security, crime and the production of new housing are mentioned.
How far did this small-scale first-generation citizen science reach in its ambition to focus on alternatives to top-down data collection by the municipalities and then influence policy makers? Citizen science is a good way to bypass structural discrimination by empowering marginalized groups, which it did accomplish. Besides this, citizen scientists’ data and the researchers’ findings were only used in a limited form to inform decision makers about otherwise hidden issues with the aim of creating a wider debate about future plans to develop these neighborhoods. Thus, moving into the future, more extensive citizen science activities can be used to increase empowerment and, more importantly, achieve a greater policy impact. Particularly, citizen scientists, both young and old, ought to be included specifically in the process of neighborhood development and generally in city planning. This should include everything from identifying the most urgent community challenges in their neighborhoods to advocating for new measures and interacting with local policy makers directly.
The authors will continue to endeavor to improve the aspects of the citizen science method applied herein. To this end, there is an apparent need to change the current strategy to include a more precise recording and documentation of the decision makers’ reactions to the citizen scientists’ pictures. Moreover, the method needs to link better with those public agencies that make decisions that influence the everyday lives of citizen scientists. For instance, since it is difficult to determine the impact that newspaper articles and TV appearances have on public opinion, it would be more appropriate to present citizen scientists’ data to the political majority, residents and the public. If the citizen scientists themselves could participate in such presentations and outreach, other research projects in this area suggest that greater local impacts could occur [
62].