Based on interview material relating to the current wave of housing renovation in Swedish cities, this article will analyse the profit-driven, traumatic and violent displacement in the wake of contemporary large-scale renovation processes of the so-called Million Program housing estates from the 1960s and 1970s. We maintain that the current form of displacement (through renovation) has become a regularized profit strategy, for both public and private housing companies in Sweden. We will pay special attention to Marcuse's notion of 'displacement pressure' which refers not only to actual displacement but also to the anxieties, uncertainties, insecurities and temporalities that arise from possible displacement due to significant rent increases after renovation and from the course of events preceding the actual rent increase. Examples of the many insidious forms in which this pressure manifests itself will be given-examples that illustrate the hypocritical nature of much planning discourse and rhetoric of urban renewal. We illustrate how seemingly unspectacular measures and tactics deployed in the renovation processes have far-reaching consequences for tenants exposed to actual or potential displacement. Displacement and displacement pressure due to significant rent increases (which is profit-driven but justified by invoking the 'technical necessity' of renovation) undermines the 'right to dwell' and the right to exert a reasonable level of power over one's basic living conditions, with all the physical and mental benefits that entails-regardless of whether displacement fears materialize in actual displacement or not.
The idea of cohousing is alive in many industrialized countries today. It is seen as an interesting alternative way of living in late modern cities, where a majority of people live in families, couples or single households, but since there is a general lack of knowledge of what it means to live in a cohousing unit there are also prejudices. In cohousing units, the members are bound up to each other not by family ties but as separate persons with different relations. The inhabitants are living in different households and flats and with common spaces. Architecture is important as well as the organization of cooperation and everyday life. This article presents results from a study on "cohousing for second half of life" in the capital city of Sweden. The main question is: What does it mean to live in a cohousing unit and who is living here? Through in-depth interviews, we found that the residents in this type of dwelling underscore the possibility of both autonomy and dependency, privacy and togetherness. Theoretically, the relations in a cohousing unit can neither be characterized as Gemeinschaft nor Gesellschaft but at the same time it could be both/and. This evokes a third social relationship of the Bund -a theoretical concept beyond the dichotomy of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.
This paper is an investigation into the psychological aspects of displacement, where displacement is understood as a form of un-homing that severs the connection between people and place. Extending the human-geographical discussion begun by Mark Davidson and Rowland Atkinson on the possibility of being displaced while staying put, I argue that words and narratives – here exemplified by the Swedish (neo-classical) economic discourse on market rents – can displace people, and that this particular kind of un-homing is best understood as alienation. A theoretical underpinning is psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe’s work on identity and language and on the effects of neoliberal political economy on our psychological well-being. I analyze texts by and interviews with economists arguing for the abolishment of the ‘rent regulation system’ and find that their use of the terms ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ frames (current) tenants as undeserving and in the way. Economists encourage displacement (of people who lack the means to pay market rents), they gentrify with their words. By being told they are a ‘welfare loss’, tenants with affordable housing in attractive parts of the city are pushed to become critical on-lookers onto themselves, thereby dis-placed from the spontaneous act of dwelling and alienated from their original insideness. A larger conclusion is that the famous economist Milton Friedman was right: neo-classical economic theory, and homo neoliberalismus, in particular, does not respect geography. This disrespect, I explain, should be interpreted as a philosophical negligence towards human situatedness in place, and as an ethical carelessness towards people’s need for home.
What are the relations between urban form and social and economic processes in the city? Or more importantly: How can we come to terms with these relations? These questions — fundamental not only for social scientists across the disciplines, but indeed also for architectural theorists — make up the underlying themes of this interview with Bill Hillier, professor of Architectural and Urban Morphology, Bartlett School, University College London. The interview was conducted at his office in the spring of 2008 and the purpose was to discuss Professor Hillier’s ideas on space, urbanity and the theory of space syntax put forward in his well-known book Space is the Machine from 1996. The conversation also provides interesting insights into Professor Hillier’s thoughts on the relation between the human mind and her material surroundings.
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