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

Abstract

This study investigates how individuals emotionally connect to their neighbourhoods and public spaces through feelings of belonging, attachment, detachment, and alienation. Drawing on the work of Doreen Massey and Sara Ahmed, the authors introduce the concept of affective placemaking to examine how emotions shape and circulate through everyday experiences and narratives about place. The research is based on urban ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Stockholm suburbs of Rågsved and Farsta during 2024, including interviews, narrative walks, mental mapping, participant observation, and affective mapping. The analysis identifies three “threads of affective placemaking”: scenes of shock and sticking affect; everyday choreographies, accumulating intensities, and the making of symbolic places; and loving and living amid diversity and stigma. These threads demonstrate how places gain meaning through embodied interactions, historical narratives, emotions, and everyday encounters. The study argues that placemaking should be understood as a dynamic and relational process shaped by contested power relations, affective solidarities, and lived experiences. It concludes that urban planning should move beyond formal interventions and recognise the emotional geographies of place and residents’ everyday practices of meaning-making.