Introduction & Purpose: Digital interventions for changing problematic alcohol use have shown small effect sizes in relation to control groups. A meta-analysis (Riper et al., 2014) found an overall effect size of 0.20, with slightly higher effect sizes of 0.23 for interventions with a human guide, compared to 0.20 for unguided interventions. This presentation describes five different interventions, from unguided low-intensity to high-intensity guided interventions, evaluated in separate randomized controlled trials (RCT). Methods: Target groups included internet help-seekers and university students, with hazardous drinking according to the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT), excessive drinking based on national public health guidelines, or diagnosed alcohol use disorder (AUD). Study 1 evaluated eScreen.se, offering minimal screening and personal feedback, and alkoholhjalpen.se, a self-help program, with 633 internetbased participants reporting hazardous drinking. Study 2 evaluated the PartyPlanner and Promillekoll smartphone apps with 1932 university students reporting hazardous drinking. Study 3 evaluated the TeleCoach skills-based app with 186 university students who drank excessively. For studies 1-3 assessment-only controls were comparison groups. Study 4 compared the unguided eChange 10-week program to a guided version with 80 internet-based participants having at least hazardous use. Study 5 with 166 participants compared the high-intensity ePlus 13-week program to the unguided eChange program in a 13-week version, and a small wait-list control group. Results: Studies 1-5 are compared with one another in terms of baseline characteristics and results. Although inclusion criteria varied, baseline AUDIT levels out of a maximum of 40 points for studies 1-5 respectively were 20.82 (SD 6.93), 10.55 (3.90); 13.46 (4.69); 21.00 (4.90) and 23.70 (1.40). Within-group and between-group results are compared, showing greater effects for more intensive interventions. Conclusions: Effects vary by target groups, severity levels and interventions, but it is clear that digital interventions contribute to reduced problematic alcohol use.

Denna skrift diskuterar aktiviteter i och resultat av ett pilotprojekt inom Mistra Urban Futures, kallat Multi-level governance. Pilotprojektets fokus har varit flernivåstyrning eller, vilket kommer att diskuteras senare, kanske snarare sektorssamverkan. Mistra Urban Futures (fortsättningsvis MURF) är ett transdisciplinärt kunskapscenter, lokaliserat i Göteborg sedan 2010. Centret är ett konsortium med Mistra som huvudfinansiär, men där även SIDA, Göteborgs Stad, Chalmers, Göteborgs universitet, Västra Götalandsregionen, Länsstyrelsen Västra Götaland, Göteborgskommunens kommunalförbund och IVL Svenska Miljöinstitutet står för både finansiering och kunskapande. Kunskapscentret är således uppbyggt både av forskningsmiljöer och förvaltningar och myndigheter som på olika vis praktiskt arbetar med att genomföra hållbar urban utveckling. Centrets första år har präglats av en sökande verksamhet med olika öppna workshops och föreläsningar, med syfte att generera input till de kunskapsprojekt som skall prägla verksamheten under det kommande knappa decenniet. Pilotprojekten har varit fem stycken till antalet och har fokuserat olika problem eller möjligheter för hållbar urban utveckling, exempelvis klimatförändringar, medborgarinflytande och näringslivsfrågor. Pilotprojekten, som pågick mellan april 2010 till och med slutet av 2011, har inledningsvis tjänat som centrets huvudsakliga processer avseende input till den framtida kunskapande verksamheten.1 Varje pilotprojekt har haft ett delat ledarskap, med en forskare och en praktiker, som tillsammans lett en arbetsgrupp huvudsakligen – men inte uteslutande – bestående av representanter från konsortiets parter. Även arbetsgrupperna har varit bemannade av såväl forskare som praktiker. Utgångspunkten för detta är att Mistra Urban Futures har ett transdisciplinärt kunskapande som en grundläggande utgångspunkt.2 I MURF uttrycks detta allmänt som att alla är kunskapsbärare och att alla är kunskapsproducenter. Vetenskaplig kunskap och praktisk kunskap skall i det här sammanhanget arbeta tillsammans. Det är den förutsättningar för att skapa hållbar urban utveckling. I projektgruppen för det pilotprojekt som avrapporteras i denna skrift, har Lars Lilled (Göteborgs Stad, Social resursförvaltning/S2020), Kerstin Elias Göteborgsregionens kommunalförbund (GR) och White), Elin Johansson (Länsstyrelsen Västra Götaland och Kungsbacka kommun), Jan Gustafsson (Trafikverket), Ylva Löf (Göteborgs Stad, Stadsbyggnadskontoret och GR) och Magnus Johansson (Malmö högskola, institutionen för urbana studier och institutet för hållbar stadsutveckling (ISU)) deltagit vid sidan av projektledarna Joakim Forsemalm (Göteborgs universitet, Göteborg Research Institute och Radar Arkitektur och Planering) och Stig Montin (Göteborgs- och Örebros universitet).

Slutrapport från forskningscirkel om utepedagogik och genus som genömfördes tillsammas med Naturskolan i Malmö och tre förskolor.

Begreppet hållbar utveckling är idag ett väletablerat begrepp, samtidigt som det är komplext och öppet för olika tolkningar. Hållbar utveckling innebär att samhället måste planera utifrån såväl ekologiska och sociala som ekonomiska aspekter. Eftersom begreppet kan förstås på olika sätt är utbildning en viktig del i utvecklingen av ett hållbart samhälle – inte bara för att utveckla kunskaper utan även för att få möjlighet att reflektera över problem och möjligheter. Betydelsen av en hållbar samhällsutveckling förstärktes i och med att FN utlyste en dekad för lärande om hållbar utveckling mellan åren 2005 och 2014. Målet med denna dekad var att elever och studenter skall kunna utveckla verktyg för att på så sätt kunna göra medvetna fram- tida val med hänsyn till ekologisk, ekonomisk och social hållbarhet. Med detta som grund har även Naturskyddsföreningen arbetat med att stärka och utveckla utbildningen för hållbar utveckling. Latinskolan i Malmö har fungerat som en modellskola för utvecklingen av lärande om hållbar utveckling med stöd av Naturskyddsföreningen. Projektet har även inkluderat samverkan med Malmö högskola, vilket har inneburit att forskare med förankring inom forskningsområdet hållbar utveckling arbetat med en forskningscirklel för lärare från Latinskolan för att på så sätt fördjupa kunskaperna inom området lärande för hållbar utveckling. Denna rapport är resultaten av denna forskningscirkel. I rapporten kan man läsa om följande projekt: Lena Ansner och Sofia Gustafson Aarnivaara har undersökt hur estetiska designprocesser kan bidra till att utveckla elevers kritiska tänkande såväl som deras möjligheter att ta plats i offentligheten. För att undersöka detta genomförde de ett projekt om gatukonst – där eleverna dels studerade befintlig gatukonst, dels gjorde egen gatukonst. Detta reste frågor om vems röst som får höras i samhället, och på vilken plats. I sin analys utforskade Lena och Sofia hur elever kan använda den konstnärliga processen för att ta plats och göra avtryck i det offentliga rummet och därmed stärka sin känsla av delaktighet i stadens utveckling. Josefine Lindeberg och Helena Heister har undersökt hur ett undervisningstema tillsammans där språkämnena svenska och engelska och biologiämnet skulle hjälpa eleverna att använda sina kunskaper för att argumentera och ta ställning i en hållbarhetsfråga. Ämnesområdet var genteknik, ett spännande case för att lyfta hållbar utveckling eftersom frågor kring hälsa, ekologi, men även ekonomiska vinstintressen är ständigt närvarande inom detta område. Ett resultat från studien handlar om frågan om att arbeta och svårigheten att försöka sammansmälta olika ämnen. I skolan finns en mängd olika strukturella motstånd som stör lärandet. Lars Berggren undersökte, inom ramen för ett ämnesövergripande medieprojekt, hur detta kunde bidra till att eleverna utvecklar en global handlingskompetens och en pluralistisk syn på vad som är »hållbart«. Tillsammans i projektet – som handlade om mänskliga rättigheter – arbetade en medieklass på estetiska programmet och en språkintroduktionsklass med nyanlända flyktingar. I inledningsfasen av hade esteteleverna en ganska gängse uppfattning om att svenskar är bättre än andra på mänskliga rättigheter, men efterhand infann sig en viss ödmjukhet inför språkintroduktionsklassens elevers kunskaper och erfarenheter.

Kunskap är en viktig faktor bakom miljövändligt beteende. Men varför händer det då så lite när det finns så mycket kunskap om miljöproblemen? Låt oss börja med att konstatera att det inte finns något självklart samband mellan kunskaper, attityder och handling även om de i viss mån kan relateras till varandra. Att vi har kunskap om ett problem behöver inte påverka våra attityder till problemet eller vår vilja att agera för att lösa det. Våra möjligheter att handla kan också påverkas av andra faktorer än bristen på kunskap.

The aim of the thesis is to investigate experiences of and ways of relating to environmental issues and towards their profession among a group of environmentalists with a degree in environmental science. The respondents were either in the end of or had completed an educational program in Environmental sciences with a social science perspective offered at Malmö University. Those who had completed the program has recently begun to work with environmental issues in different professional settings. The methodology of the thesis is based in the phenomenological notion of intentionality. According to this line of thought, our consciousness is characterised by being directed towards the world. This direction confers certain content to our experiences of the world, which we then relate to. These experiences will here be studied using a phenomenographic methodological approach. Within the phenomenographic approach, variations in people’s experiences of different phenomena are explored, in other words, qualitatively different ways of experiencing the same situation or phenomenon. Experiences are seen as possible to describe by means of verbal statements. These statements may in turn be considered analytically as expressions for different aspects of expereiences of a phenomenon. The interview material allowed four distinct ways of experiencing environmental problems and three distinct manners of relating to these environmental issues to be identified: approaching them as administrative and organisational problems, as lifestyle problems in a mass consumption society, or as global, moral and existential challenges. Two groups of experiences about the profession could be distinguished in the material: those that concerned conceptions of practice in their own profession and those that concerned conceptions of their own professional identity. Lastly, the following manners of relating to the profession could be identified in the interview material: a profession where it is necessary to deal with existential issues; a profession where it is important not to come across as being extreme; and finally, a profession that is part of an inevitable societal change. Starting in the experiences and approaches identified above, three abstract professional scenes could be described. These scenes constitute different descriptions of fields of potentiality that frame the experiences and approaches in the interview material. The scences are the administrative and organisational scene; the scene for educating and informing individuals; as well as the scene for ‘environmental sermons’. The profession the environmentalists’ in this study were striving to acquire could be described as comprising two levels: a global and a local level. The environmentalists’ could therefore see him/herself as more or less competent to deal with environmental issues in different professional practices depending on which level was related to. Within the two levels, environmental problems were formulated starting in different point of departure, which in turn meant that different types of solutions could be formulated. At a global level, problem formulation was based on scientific knowledge and general policy discussions. At a local level, the problem formulation was based in the established norms, traditions and routines of local practice. A graduate in Environmental Science may therefore perceive his/her mission as ‘bringing down’ global problem formulations into a local practice. Graduates in Environmental Science need to develop a reflexive attitude, and become aware of their own view of the causes and possible solutions to environmental problems.

This is a conceptual paper with the purpose of clarifying some challenges in developing a curriculum for a higher level ESD in cooperation with external partners in order to prepare students to work as professionals with sustainable development. The paper will broaden the theoretical discussion about ESD to the question of how higher level ESD can promote developments of professional skills for working with sustainable development. The paper begins with a discussion about the challenges of prepare people to work with sustainable development as professionals. I will then arguing in favour of that this implies that people have to learn experiences their professional practice in a different way – and in the same time challenge existing practices. This could be achieved by an action research approach when educators and researchers together with practitioners from different fields critically examine practices from a sustainable development stand point.

The purpose with this article is to discuss the researchers’ position within phenomenographic research. With this I mean the researchers’ relation to the empiric material. This is also a question how to practice a methodology – in this case phenomenographic methodology. A methodology assigns a position to the research object and describes the abilities the researcher need to develop in order to handle a specific kinds of research. In a phenomenographic perspective learning is viewed as a process of variation and discrimination. This is also a process of creating connections and relations between parts and the general pictures of something. As human beings we become aware of the world when we point our attention to aspects’ of the world. This means that we see something as something. We are afraid of something, we are in love with someone and so one. This mean that we also become aware of something related to a background – to a context – which is created of a web of relations. To learn something one have to discern the parts and the relation between parts in order to be able to se the whole picture of something in a new way – to express it with new intentions. This process of decontextualisation creates the opportunity to integrate the expressed phenomenon in a new context and change the relation to it. In a phenomenographic approach knowledge about something is manifested in a relation between the subject and the phenomenon which is understood. Knowledge in general could therefore be understood as a web of relations between different expressions about the world. This could also be described as web of relations between parts and wholes. The purpose with the phenomenographic research is descriptions of overarching structures of meaning based on individual statements about phenomenon or aspects of the world. These structures of meanings are seen as descriptions of some parts of the web of relations that constitute individuals knowledge of the world. When the phenomenographic researcher analyze individuals statements about aspects of the world, for example, the content of their work, the signification of political power or how one should teach, the researcher had to find out the different ways of express the phenomenon which is described through this statements. The aim is to describe and categorize the variations’ of expressions of a phenomenon. This could also be view as a learning process, a process of variation and discrimination. The researcher try to find out the variation of expressions by shifting focus in the reading of the interviews. It is a dynamic process. But as a research one need to come to an end, to find results. One needs to stop this dynamic process at some point. The phenomenographic researcher must develop an ability to know when the research process are finished, when the overarching structure of meaning is fully described. But how cold one know that? This lead us to the discussion about validity and reliability in phenomenographic research. As a phenomenographic researcher one could establish a communicative validity by an ongoing dialogue with the material. This dialogue could be a way of establishing reliability as interpretative awareness. This mean, for short, that the researcher must be aware of his or hers interpretations of the material. But interpretations is the only way to develop some kind of new knowledge about a phenomenon. The researcher must to some extend interpret the material. But that lead us back to the problem of knowing when the interpretation of the material is ready. When should one stop the dynamic analyse and decide that one has identified the informants expressions of the investigated phenomenon? One could take a phenomenological position and strive for the core of the expressions. One could also take a constructive position and view the research results as the researchers description of the content in different statements about phenomenon. This mean that the research results only could be viewed as one way to describe overarching structures of meaning which constitute ways of expressing a phenomenon. One could therefore compare the research process with a sneaking game, where one as a researcher tries to catch a research object with the potential to escape the attempts to give it a full description. The categories of expressions should be viewed as situated to a specific research context. As a researcher one must be aware of the position one take towards the empirical material. The research results are situated in the research context

Förslag på hur man kan organisera forskningssamverkan mellan Malmö stad och Malmö högskola kring frågor som rör hållbar stadsutveckling. Rapporten skrevs inom ramen för mitt uppdrag som forskningskoordinator på Institutet för hållbar stadsutveckling (ISU) under 2010.

Slutrapport från forskningscirkeln om förutsättningar för att arbeta med lokal hållbar stadsutveckling.

En översiktlig kartläggning och försök till kategorisering av olika former av samverkan mellan Malmö stad och Malmö högskola under 2010

The school has the potential of being an important meeting point between citizens and the community. Education for sustainable development could be one way of using this potential. But this demands that booth the school and the community cooperate with the intention to create such meeting points. This paper will present one example of this kind of cooperation with focus on creating participatory action research about education for sustainable development. The Environment Department of the City of Malmo has begun to work with researcher from Malmo University with the intention of starting research circles with teachers with education for sustaniable development as a theme. A research circle is a participatory action research method where practitioner (in this case teachers employed by city of Malmö) together with researcher formulated research questions based on their experiences of their own praxis. In this case, the goal is to develop a critical understanding of teaching and learning processes about sustaniable issues as a teacher. The paper is a critical reflection about research circles as a method for developing community based learning, with a research focus, about sustaniable development. The empiric material is based on our experiences of working with the method as a way of developing cooperation between the city of Malmö, Malmö University and teacher working at schools in Malmö.

Today, there is a common understanding that universities and the stakeholders in the society need to collaborate in order to handle big societal challenges. Sometimes this is mention as a need of developing mode 2-knowledge. Other times it is describe as a need of developing triple helix processes. A general problem for these kinds of collaborations is different needs of knowledge and different conditions for knowledge production. University knowledge are mainly general and focal, are disseminated mainly through text. Knowledge among stakeholders outside the university, like citizens or professionals, is situated and tacit, and is mainly disseminate through practice. The aim with the paper is two-fold. First, we would like to describe a model for knowledge development between urban researchers and professional public planners. The model was developed by a group of urban planners together with the authors of the paper, who were engaged as on-going evaluators of an urban regeneration project. The aim with the model was to summarize their personal experience of working with collaborative urban planning. The model could therefore be seen as a way for those urban planners to conceptualize their personal experience of an urban developmental project, with the help of urban researchers. During the work with the model, we need to handle the tension between theoretical knowledge versus tacit personal knowledge. How could we as researcher support the transformation of tacit knowledge into a more general model based on focal knowledge? Based on this experience, we take a step back in the second part of the paper, and try to understand the process which leads to the development of the model. Here we will use this process as a way to illustrate what we see as the main challenge in university – society interaction: different needs of knowledge, and different ways to develop knowledge. We will argue that collaboration between university and the society, irrespective of which stakeholders is included in the collaboration, must handle the tensions between different conditions for knowledge production within the academia and outside it. Our way of working is one way to this.

There is a need to improve the validity, reliability, and replicability of social and health science research and its applications through raising the quality of measurement. An important step is to establish and implement a clear and useful guideline for reporting and assessing psychometric properties of measures. We propose five basic criteria as a minimal checklist to help end users assess the quality of psychometric studies: unidimensionality; ordered response categories, invariance; targeting; and, contingent upon the previous four being fulfilled, reliability. An expanded and detailed reporting guideline is also presented, intended for use in reports and scientific publications of psychometric analyses. We argue that reliability should be reported using a Test Information Function curve, which describes the properties of the items, rather than a point estimate describing sample properties. Additionally, we present a freely available R package to streamline psychometric analysis with Rasch Measurement Theory and its documentation in line with the reporting guideline.

Households base their choices of heating systems on subjectively dependent conceptions of heating sources, rather than on an understanding of a complex reality. Similar to other agents in society, households need to construct simplified frames to be able to make their choices possible to manage. Using in-depth interviews with households in Småland (in Sweden) with a few comparisons from Massachusetts (in the USA), the study has identified a number of frames through which households simplify the financial, practical and ecolological complexities of various heating systems. The households have been sampled strategically in order to generate a broad range of household responses. Various heating systems – based on bioenergi, electricity, and fossil fuels - are covered in the study. Objective household categories (e.g., age, generation, housing type or size), frequently covered in previous studies, have a weak connection to choices of energy systems. Instead, this study has elaborated on four subjective household categories more closely correlated with energy system choices: the energy implementors, the planners, the visionaries, and the resigned. The report argues that an understanding of subjective household categories and frame constructions are useful as various energy actors try to collaborate with households toward different heating systems. This understanding is especially important for the transition to and maintenance of bioenergy solutions. However, it is crucial that such collaboration not be reduced to “learning about misunderstandings and knowledge gaps among households in order to correct them.” Rather, the type of collaboration that we call for concern taking into account, and learning from, various types of priorities and experiences which are reflected in the frame constructions among the household categories.

Denna antologi är ett resultat av ett gemensamt arbete mellan forskare och tjänstemän för att diskutera möjligheterna och formerna för det praktiska arbetet kring hållbar stadsutveckling. År 2010 utlystes medel inom programmet Samordnad stadsutveckling - en förutsättning för hållbarhet, vilket har finansierat forskningsprojektet Omvandling av fragmenterade städer. En studie av att integrera hållbarhetsmål genom urbana rörelsestråk, med finansiering från FORMAS och RAÄ för att under tre år fördjupa sig i hållbar stadsutveckling och inte minst kring sociala utmaningar. I fokus för projektet är Malmö stads satsning på att knyta ihop de östra och västra delarna av Malmö genom förstärkandet av ett stråk. Antologin presenterar både konkreta resultat av dessa satsningar, och reflektioner kring de processer som initierades. http://www.mah.se/Forskning/omforskning/Organisation/Profiler/Forskningsprofil-Urbana-studier/Funktioner-och-tjanster/Skriftserie---MAPIUS/

In this chapter we describe and analyze a case of public innovation in regional planning in Sweden. It connects to the overall framework of public innovations in several ways. First, it illustrates how collaborative planning and policymaking can be designed to produce innovative policy. Second, it provides some empirically based ideas on what kinds of mechanisms make collaborative policymaking durable and innovative. By way of introduction we give a short overview of how ‘regional planning’ in Sweden has been reframed. 

Thanks to Elinor Ostrom and associates we know a lot about what kind of mechanisms are important for facilitating collaboration among rational actors, especially in cases of dealing with scare natural resources. Still, theoretical frameworks and criteria’s based on Rational Choice is not applicable on all cases of collective action and collaboration. Especially in cases of innovative collaboration, which are not problem-driven but goal-driven and when the interests of involved actors are not to be taken for granted, there is need for other theories. The proposed paper will empirically be based on two cases of collaborative innovations, which means that the collaborations in themselves were innovative and the outcome of the collaboration process also was innovative. The cases are interrelated as they took place in the same region (Göteborgsregionen). The first case is collaboration between civil servants from different public authorities and the outcome of the process was a strategy for doubling public transport in the urban region. The second case was a consultation process including almost all council politicians in all 13 municipalities in the urban region. This consultation was initiated by the GR and the outcome of the process was an agreement of a common vision for transport policy in the urban region (“strukturbilden”). In trying to understand why the collaboration was taken place and how it was possible for the collaborating actors to come up with innovative strategies three theoretical perspectives will be applied and further developed: meta-governance, micro-sociological dynamics and social learning, stemming from political science, ethnology and pedagogy. The first perspective will focus on steering strategies used by political and administrative leaders (cf. political framing and governing by proxy). The second perspective will be focused on participating actors sense-making and construction of projects and the third perspective will be focused on learning in dialogues. These three perspectives are seen as complementary, which means that the theoretical aim of the paper is to suggest a coherent theory for understanding and explaining similar kinds of collaborative innovations.

In a recent effort the municipality of Malmö, Sweden has sought to increase citizen involvement and active participation in the governance of public space as a platform for creating social integration and raising the status of stigmatized areas. It is hoped that the citizens themselves once these platforms are available will contribute to reversing the stigmatization of an area both by addressing undesirable behaviors directly but also indirectly through the symbolic value created by cared-for public space. The central concern of this paper is the comparison of three attempts by the municipality at creating forms co-governance of public space as a means of social integration along a central path or route connecting affluent parts of the city with less affluent and stigmatized areas. The examples illustrate what may be considered planning for appropriation, where local government actively encourages specific groups to appropriate public space in order to shape social interaction. The first case analyzed is an attempt to break-up the mono-functional housing in the area by introducing small shops and thus create a greater diversity and increasing the number of ‘eyes on the street’. The second case concerns encouraging the use of municipal parks for community gardening, once again to increase diversity and presence in underused space but also to build social capital and efficacy in a broad sense. The third case is concerned with creating an outdoor cultural event space to be co-run by the municipality and residents. This event space is also tailored toward providing young women with an opportunity to shape public space. The cases are analyzed in the light of policy making and also in the light of general discussions on the politics of public space.

Governance of shared resources has been intensely studied by Elinor Ostrom and colleagues. There is a very rich body of work on the governance of shared resources such as fisheries, watersheds, woodlands and the like, These authors have shown that common resources can be managed effectively without recourse to privatization or direct government control. This paper seeks to highlight key issues of how commons in urban settings have been studied in academic literature with the purpose to develop an understanding of what, if any, characteristics are specific or accentuated in the governance of urban commons. The paper begins with a brief discussion of how the commons framework and its application in traditional commons and proceeds to a discussion of urban commons. Subsequently we seek to delineate a small set of characteristics that seem relevant in many of the studied cases and which seem to derive from characteristics of the urban setting. We argue that a careful consideration of these characteristics will provide input to a much-needed understanding of how shared resources in an urban setting can be collaboratively managed and developed.

Any urban setting will contain privately owned spaces, public space and different aspects of mixed space that are not wholly public or private but which constitute common resources. Some urban common resources are tangible such as parks, sidewalks and libraries and some are intangible like a sense of security allowing people to move freely in the city, a sense of belonging, or general buzz. The notion of commons has been given an important upswing in popularity after Elinor Ostrom’s 2009 Nobel Prize. Her work on common-pool resources seems to provide a starting point for grappling with issues of urban commons. However, Ostrom’s earlier work (Ostrom 1990) deals with subtractive and tangible resources (like fish, water and forests). And one important design principle for governance of these commons is that the group of appropriators can erect clear boundary rules. A central characteristic of urban settings however is mobility, permeable boundaries and perhaps that at least occasionally resources are less clearly subtractible. It is therefore questionable to what extent theories of governing the commons relying on Ostrom’s models can be applied in urban settings. However, it may also be that urban commons may have somewhat different character but may be fruitfully approached using the same basic framework. Inroads have been made for instance on informational commons (Ostrom 2007) which also seem radically different from fisheries or water basins. This paper presents are review (in process) of how Ostrom's theories have been applied in urban studies and to highlight the potential and limitations of these approaches.

Scandinavian countries are generally associated with extensive public services and low levels of poverty. However, reality has changed dramatically over the last three decades, and Scandinavia’s cities now share many of the problems and challenges familiar from other Western cities. How do the welfare states handle these global societal transformations? In Social Transformations in Scandinavian Cities, researchers highlight the changing face of social sustainability and social disintegration in Scandinavian cities. They offer theoretical and empirical analyses of how migration, inequality, and residential segregation intersect with shifting national and local policies, charting their impact on urban landscapes in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The authors challenge the standard view of Scandinavia as a haven of equality and peace. Unemployment, criminality, and poor school performance in ethnically and socio-economically segregated residential areas have finally been recognized and tackled through urban policies since the 1990s. In Social Transformations in Scandinavian Cities we learn why and in which ways progress is being made.