Navigating Danger through Nuisance: Racialized Urban Fears, Gentrification, and Sensory Enskilment in Amsterdam

Abstract

In this article, I employ the notion of sensory enskilment to investigate the embodied relations through which White Dutch middle-class residents of the Indische Buurt, a rapidly gentrifying multicultural neighborhood in the east of Amsterdam, learn to tune in to sensory nuisance to discern safe and unsafe bodies and places in their surroundings. The analysis involves examining those institutional and interactional avenues of (unwitting) sensory learning through which habituated perceptual patterns of stigmatization that conflate the everyday sensory order of Moroccan-Dutch youths with feelings of urban insecurity are cultivated, produced, and consolidated. Studying the ways in which sensory knowledge is implicated in the reproduction of socioeconomic exclusions in contested urban territories can shed new light on discussions around urban sensory politics and draw attention to the enrolment of the senses in revanchist urban renewal.