Vulnerable areas in Oslo – toward “Swedish conditions”?

In the past decade, Sweden has experienced a large increase in gang violence, strongly linked to what is termed “vulnerable areas”. This has sparked concerns about vulnerable areas across the Nordic countries. A recurring public debate is how to prevent the occurrence of “Swedish conditions” and its implications for gang violence, and more broadly, ethnic segregation. As a result, there has been an increased emphasis on analyzing the spatial separation of different social groups and geographical patterns of crime.The Danish government annually publishes a list of vulnerable neighborhoods, which included 17 neighborhoods in 2022. Similarly, in Sweden, the police release a biannual list of vulnerable areas, with the most recent edition contains 61 areas. How vulnerable areas are defined and identified differ between and within these countries. Currently, Norway lacks a national strategy for identifying vulnerable areas, but both the City of Oslo and the Oslo police department have recently adopted similar approaches.In this study, we use methods applied in Denmark (Danish government, 2022a) and Sweden (Guldåker et al., 2021) to identify similarly vulnerable areas in Oslo. By doing so, we identify the differences that exist between the two methods and observe that Norway appears to be less segregated. To further build on our understanding of vulnerable neighborhoods, we also analyze differences in crime levels among the identified areas.