This article investigates the lived experiences of tenants staying put in two neighborhoods undergoing urban renewal processes and increased rent levels in Uppsala, Sweden. The article is drawing on a place sensitive analysis to escape a ‘Euclidean prison’ that we contend underpin many displacement studies; studies that reduce the notion of displacement to only signify out-migration. Such studies often miss both the scope of displacement, and the grievances experienced by tenants following changes in place and space under various urban transformation processes. Through phenomenologically inspired interviews with tenants, we contend that place cannot, as it often is in practices of urban development, simply be understood as coordinates on a map, but has to be understood relationally. Adhering to such a place-sensitive understanding of space our study asks what changes to place and to ‘home’ is experienced by tenants staying put in neighborhoods under increasing displacement pressures. What surfaces is a series of displacements that can be categorized as spatial dispossessions; thematized under subcategories ‘contraction of home’ and ‘withering entitlements’, and temporal dispossessions; categorized under ‘life on hold’ and ‘erasure of history’. These displacements are suffered by tenants who despite displacement pressures have remained throughout the renewal process.

Neighbourhood unrest is gaining attention in media, politics, and academia. Anti-displacement grassroots networks are growing, and articles about displacement and displacement trauma are prevalent in the news. This development can be predominantly attributed to a sharp rise in overhaul renovations of the large housing stock from the 1950s to 1970s and the accompanying rent increases for tenants. Nonetheless, is this really a new gentrification frontier we are witnessing in Sweden or a paradigm shift to a post-gentrification housing regime? This chapter discusses these questions using the example of Kvarngardet and Granby, two Swedish neighbourhoods in Uppsala municipality, the fourth largest city in Sweden. It attempts to make an ad hoc test of gentrification for the development in Granby and Kvargardet using common methodological approaches in identifying gentrifiable, gentrifying, and gentrified neighbourhoods in the literature. Sweden has a long history of gentrification, even if the various processes have not always been denoted as gentrification.  

Despite decreases in formal evictions in Sweden, housing precarity measured through homelessness as well as through various forms of displacement is increasing. It is therefore important to conceptualize beyond evictions when looking to the condition of various housing regimes. Forced relocation following renovations (renoviction) is a dominant form of displacement in Sweden today, and this form of displacement makes little difference compared to formal evictions, in terms of outcomes for both landlords and tenants.  Drawing inspiration from displacement literature, I suggest conceptualizing all forms of ‘mundane displacement’ that lead to forced relocation as ‘structural evictions’. By mundane displacement I mean displacement processes instigated from within an already established political and legal framework, by actors in the realm of housing, that result in for instance increased costs of living for households to the extent that they are forced to leave their homes. I will use the example of renoviction to show how the boundary between formal evictions and structural evictions through renoviction are blurry at best. In this paper the similarities between formal evictions and displacement through renoviction will be illustrated through narratives by tenants relocated within two neighborhoods in Uppsala, Sweden, that are undergoing renovations.

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.