A man called NIMBY? The ambivalent affects of contested displacement in A Man Called Ove and A Man Called Otto

‘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.