This presentation focuses a group of young outdoor-oriented and motor enthusiast men followed over a four-month field work in a small Swedish community. The field work consisted of (participation) observation of a youth center and a central meeting place in the evenings, the local shop’s entrance courtyard, and interviews with youths aged between 14 to 20 years. The aim of the project is to understand and raise awareness of both young men’s exercise of and subjection to various forms of violence/violations and insecurity in public space by analyzing the creation and maintenance of social relations and of the two specific locations (the youth center and the store entrance courtyard) in relation to power structures on gender and mobility. One objective is to gain knowledge of how, where and why the young people in the study resides outside the home in their spare time and what it means to have access to a moped, car or other motorized vehicle in this setting. Why does the shop’s entrance courtyard or the youth center attract the young people as viable places for socializing? In what ways is the motor interest involved in how the young men position themselves in the social geography of the outdoor night life? How is a moped or car used by the young within this context? How do the young people relate to each other in front of the store and which (motorized) actions are they engaged in?

The young men who take over the recreation yard and the shop’s entrance courtyard are using them as venues for the maintenance of social hierarchies within their own group and towards others, present and absent, young. By physically selecting who belongs to the place and who the site belongs to they create an exclusive (outdoor) room where in-group status is negotiated. In particular, the motor interested clique’s risky and violent practices – to race, burn, drive fast and/or drunk, or with trimmed engines – is understandable as both subjective enjoyment and pleasure, and as part of the collective negotiation of in-group status and socio-geographical dominance.