Spatial, Financial and Ideological Trajectories of Public Housing in Malmö, Sweden

Abstract

Public housing has been one of the primary tools mobilized in Sweden historically to fulfil citizens' right to housing. However, the nominally universal character of public housing in the Swedish context has increasingly been circumvented through processes of segregation, residualisation, gentrification and displacement. Furthermore, previous housing research points to the neoliberal shift of Sweden's housing politics since the early 1990s, encompassing the deregulation of public housing at the national level. Focusing on the example of public housing, this paper argues for a multiscalar and nuanced understanding of housing neoliberalisation in Sweden, by investigating the change of public housing locally. The political landscape of public housing in different localities has been transformed as a result of interacting trajectories of spatial restructuring, financialisation and ideological reconstruction. The paper examines this "conjunctural" transformation empirically through a case study of public housing in the city of Malmö.

Revanchism via Pedestrianism: Street‐level Bureaucracy in the Production of Uneven Policing Landscapes

“…However, since the end of the 1980s Sweden has undergone what Schierup and Scarpa (2017:42) have described as “a ground‐shattering reimagineering of the nation” along broadly neoliberal lines. This process has incorporated sweeping restructurings of welfare systems, housing politics (Baeten 2012; Grundström and Molina 2016; Gustafsson 2019), the privatisation of a number of previously state‐run institutions (Stahre 2004) and a novel focus on producing “commodifiable neighbourhoods” within increasingly entrepreneurial cities (Madureira and Baeten 2016:373). A number of scholars working in the Swedish context have however argued that the particular expressions of “actually existing neoliberalism” in Sweden (Brenner and Theodore 2002), produced in the context of a pre‐existing discursive and institutional setting provided by years of social democratic consensus, has produced a somewhat fragmented expression of neoliberal ideology (Cele 2015; Rutherford 2008; Stahre 2004).…”

The Business of Improving Neighborhoods. A Critical Overview of Neighborhood-Based Business Improvement Districts (NBIDs) in Sweden

“…Financial considerations have thus become increasingly important for MHCs, at the expense of their social responsibility and universalistic principles (Grander 2018). In order to secure market returns on their investments, MHCs have been pushed to spatially and socio-economically restructure their housing stock by buying property in attractive locations, developing their under-performing properties in stigmatized areas, and adopting stricter entry requirements for prospective tenants (Grander 2018; Gustafsson 2019).…”

“They had already sold”: Uncovering relations among the local state, the market and the public in the case of municipal housing privatization in Rosengård, Sweden

“…Starting in the UK in the 1980s, the Right to Buy-scheme inspired governments across Europe, as well as in Sweden, to roll out privatization schemes. In Sweden, privatizations in the form of sales of municipally owned housing to private rental owners, e.g., during the 1980s (Elander, 1991;Gustafsson, 2021), were accompanied by tenure conversions from municipal housing to market-based cooperative ownership during the 1990s and 2000s (Andersson and Magnusson Turner, 2014). However, since 2011, municipalities' property transactions to private rental owners have been dominant (Grander and Westerdahl, unpublished), of which some examples have gained prominence in the media following protests of tenants and citizens (Fastighetsvärlden, 2016).…”