"It is important that research does not only highlight misery."

Susanne Urban, Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in Sociology

From housing conditions to energy issues – whatever the topic, Uppsala researcher Susanne Urban remains focused on the fundamental question: inequality – how it arises and where the solutions can be found. She is currently involved in a new project at IBF, Uppsala University, funded by Formas, where energy production is being studied from an equality perspective.

Porträttbild på Susanne Urban

Foto: Mikael Wallerstedt

How are our residential areas planned, who ends up living there, and what are their living conditions like? These are central research questions for Susanne Urban, Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in Housing and Urban Sociology at IBF. She has long been interested in how cities are interconnected, how they are planned and developed, and how various local conditions – neighbourhood effects – influence people's lives.

Susanne Urban herself grew up in Alby, a suburb of Stockholm in Norra Botkyrka, and early on became interested in how newspapers reported on her neighbourhood and life there. This led her to begin studying urban and regional planning.
– I thought that the negative media coverage of the neighbourhood should inspire residents to want to prove them wrong, and in my Master’s thesis I investigated whether people in disadvantaged areas pursued higher education as a form of compensation. I found some support for this at the time and was able to confirm it further after my doctoral studies, says Susanne Urban.

Her focus has included examining how residential areas are planned and the structural factors that cause people with fewer resources to end up in certain areas. She has also studied the effects of neighbourhoods on individuals’ income and education.
– But the longer I work with this, the harder it becomes to know what is the chicken and what is the egg. It is incredibly complex. You easily end up in circular reasoning, and it is difficult to isolate the effects of the residential area itself.

At its core, her work is about highlighting injustice – simply finding out why some people are better off than others.
– I have always been committed to these kinds of issues. Previously, I worked a lot on understanding why people with a migration background face worse conditions in society. But it is important that research does not only highlight hardship. Yes, there is discrimination and inequality. But what solutions can we find, and where are the positive processes? We cannot just expose the problems; we also need to find possible ways to improve society, she says.

More recently, Susanne Urban has shifted her research focus towards environmental and climate issues from an equality perspective. A current and obvious association is, of course, the rising electricity prices and how unequally they impact people depending on where they live. In a newly launched project, Susanne Urban and her colleagues are exploring how energy production can be made fairer. Today, those with financial resources can receive tax subsidies to invest in private solar panels for their electricity supply. For others, so-called energy communities – where a group comes together to share solar panels and electricity – could be a solution. However, energy too is a complex issue without simple solutions.
– If everyone gets cheaper electricity, the incentives to save energy might decrease – meaning electricity consumption might not fall to the extent needed. At the same time, one can also question whether it should be the poorest who, through their taxes, pay for the wealthiest to receive grants to become more energy-efficient.

Taking a thematic step in a new research direction has been both a much-needed injection of energy for Susanne Urban and an important realisation about what fundamentally interests her.
– I have just started reading about electricity distribution systems, and the more I learn, the more interested I become in how we can create communities without becoming exclusionary. So, even if I change topics, the fundamental research questions remain the same, she says, and continues:
– It’s good for my brain and my development to change themes so that I do not get stuck in old ways of thinking, even if I do reuse some insights from earlier research.

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