Revanchism via Pedestrianism : Street-level Bureaucracy in the Production of Uneven Policing Landscapes

The emergence over the last decade of large numbers of vulnerable EUcitizens begging on Swedish streets has led to ambivalent responses from the Swedishstate, including from local police forces charged with policing public order. Based onresearch including interviews with vulnerable EU citizens and with police officials intwo socio-economically divergent areas of Stockholm, this paper seeks to understandhow policing practices are motivated and enacted towards this group and how thesepractices are experienced by those targeted. The results reveal a set of policing practiceswhich, whilst framed within a depoliticised logic of what Nicholas Blomley calls“pedestrianism”, work to produce spatially uneven punitive landscapes for those begging.The paper argues that understanding the role of police as “street-level bureaucrats”(following Michael Lipsky), with the agency to escalate or soften revanchistlandscapes, is fundamental to understanding the contingencies at the heart of punitiveurbanisms.