A man called NIMBY? The ambivalent affects of contested displacement in A Man Called Ove and A Man Called Otto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
‘Yes in My Back Yard’ (‘YIMBY’) movements, which have garnered increased attention for advocating developer-friendly ‘solutions’ to crises of affordable urban housing in the United States and Canadian cities, are inventive interpreters of popular culture. This article adds urban cultural studies and affect-theoretical threads to recent Left critiques of YIMBYism, building on Robert W. Lake’s critique of ‘planners’ alchemy’ – the fantasy of converting always-already parochial ‘NIMBY’ opponents of development into enlightened ‘YIMBY’ supporters. Drawing on the work of queer-feminist affect theorist Lauren Berlant, who warned against ‘positivizing the ambivalence’ that necessarily accompanies contradictory forms of social change, it makes a case of Swedish novelist Fredrick Backman’s novel A Man Called Ove (2012) and its Swedish (2015) and US (2022) film adaptations. Although claimed as YIMBY texts, I argue these works also attend to oft-ignored spatial and affective displacements resulting from both welfare-capitalist initiatives like Sweden’s Million Homes Programme and contemporary neo-liberal urbanizations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".