Review: The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and the Swedish City, by Jennifer Mack

Jennifer Mack The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and the Swedish City Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017, 344 pp., 7 maps, 78 b/w illus. $30 (paper), ISBN 9780816698714 At a moment when divisive and xenophobic rhetoric about immigrants is on the rise, “place histories” can illuminate migrants’ critical place-making practices and contextualize their complex relationships with their new homes as well as the ones they left behind. In The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and the Swedish City , Jennifer Mack presents a social, spatial, and urban history of Sodertalje, a city on the periphery of Stockholm, over the past fifty years. Drawing on a range of methodologies, Mack guides the reader through empirically rich case studies while also demonstrating how ethnographic research can inform historical analysis and contribute to the telling of vital architectural and urban stories. In large part, this book explores how Syriac spatial and building practices have disrupted Swedish architectural and planning philosophies based on the notion that formal homogeneity and uniformity promote social and economic equality. Mack also examines the assumption—made by many urban planners, politicians, and citizens—that segregated immigrant neighborhoods in Sweden are a social problem. In response to this prevalent narrative, she explores the spatial richness of so-called segregated neighborhoods as well as the stories of individual Syriac migrants, who are often perceived as being part of a monolithic immigrant bloc. These histories illustrate how those on the margins produce “urban design from below” through repeated tactical and material interventions into local planning processes and uses of public and private spaces (17). According to Mack, “rather than urban anthropology,” hers is “an anthropology of the urban,” one that creates a road map for studying a shifting material world so as to better understand migrants’ social and architectural histories (11). Sweden's unique political history makes it a particularly interesting place in which to study migrant-initiated urban change. In twentieth-century Sweden, where spatial solutions to social problems were the norm, planners and architects …