| dc.description.abstract | Space is a physical location, but also a material manifestation of our social world, continuously shaped by and producing human practice. As globalisation processes have enabled more people to seek opportunities in cities, they have also put pressure on and created urban landscapes characterised by issues such as spatial scarcity, socioeconomic friction and environmental pollution. These problems shape how people use, experience and act towards their local surroundings. In this thesis, I explore how sociocultural structures become spatialized through urban boundary making, impacting residents’ feelings of belonging and influencing their well-being. Through three cases, gated communities and favelas in São Paulo, gentrification in East Boston and pandemic restrictions in Oslo, I discuss how processes related to urbanisation and globalisation have triggered issues of friction and put pressure on the spatial organisation of these cities in different ways. In each case, I illustrate how this friction has resulted in a need to order and categorise urban “chaos” through the creation of social and material boundaries. In all three cases, these boundaries are experienced by residents in unequal ways. Residents with access to social and economic capital are able to use boundaries as sources of protection and to concentrate goods and services in an exclusive area. Residents who lack such capital, however, are often excluded from space that provides material and social infrastructure. As a consequence, lower-class residents describe issues of social displacement and material deprivation as negatively impacting their physical and mental well-being. By focusing on these experiences, I demonstrate that space is never “neutral” but is produced by and reproduces specific social structures. I aim to show how social processes can be made tangible by studying them as embodied experiences and spatial manifestations. My research question, choice of fieldsites and methodological framework has been shaped by the ongoing spread of the coronavirus, limiting my ability to follow my original fieldwork plan. As a consequence, the material drawn on in this thesis is based on published anthropological literature from urban Brazil, unpublished interview-based datasets from East Boston collected by The Barcelona Lab of Urban Environmental Studies, and interviews I conducted in Oslo. | eng |