The white worker’s hotdog and the not-so-white worker’s falafel: food-based public art and urban redevelopment in a changing society

Abstract

This paper discusses the dialectics of urban place and its public image, approached via an examination of the public process of proposing, debating, and selecting new monuments for the city of Gothenburg, Sweden. The analysis shows that while the proposed monument to the local foodstuff halv special (a type of hot dog) is generally received in a positive way, the proposal of a monument to falafel is met with criticism. The results suggest that the two artworks represent different classed, gendered, and racialized imaginations of the city and its residents: while the hotdog reproduces a long-standing and dominant Social Democrat understanding of Gothenburg as the home of the white male worker, the falafel suggests an updated and more inclusive idea of the city as multilingual and multicultural.

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