“United by Music” was the slogan of the 2024 edition of the Eurovision Song Contest, held in Malmö. However, the festive spirit of the event oddly contrasted with what was described as “the largest police operation in Sweden’s history” (Ivarsson, 2024). This operation was mobilized in response to the expected civil protests regarding Eurovision’s decision to welcome Israel’s participation, despite its ongoing genocidal war on Gaza. We examine the temporary disruptions in Malmö’s urban space during Eurovision to understand the dissonance between a peaceful pro‐Palestine movement, a supposedly festive event, and the heightened securitization of the city with its alarmist tones. We aim to understand these contrasts within a broader temporal context and across different geographical scales. We argue that the distinct racialized characterizations of neoliberal authoritarian practices in Malmö during Eurovision are deeply enmeshed with the implications of the Western narratives about Israel and Palestine, the growing influence of the far‐right in Swedish politics, and, ultimately, the identity Malmö aspires to and is perceived to have. Rather than being a local manifestation of isolated authoritarian practices, Eurovision in Malmö opens a conceptual space to explore authoritarianism as a multiscalar discourse and practice. This perspective allows us to move beyond the dichotomy of the “democratic West” versus the “authoritarian others” by revealing the persistence of authoritarian practices in democracies.

What should be the outcome of the PhD journey? One frequent answer is to produce an independent researcher who, after years of doctoral education and supervision is ready to take on the academic world. In this context, metaphors such as master and apprentice or even parent and child are frequently invoked. However, research in higher education pedagogy has pointed out that, in the context of the neoliberal university, the rather intense supervisory relation can quickly turn oppressive, especially when intersecting with other power asymmetries around class, race, ethnicity, gender, age, or physical ability. The aim of this article is to ‘trouble’ the linear notion of the independent researcher by reflecting on the multiple, and often un- or under-recognized, relations that accompany the PhD journey. Drawing on feminist approaches that reconceptualize supervision as a care-practice, we reflect on the question of how the benefits and risks of the traditional supervisory model can be balanced through an embedment of PhD supervision into an extended set of relationships. We challenge the notion of independence as alleged self-sufficiency and instead suggest that independence can successfully be produced through 'interdependence’. Such shift, we argue, may help to: first, acknowledge the net of care practices already in place and dignify it as a fundamental part of the social infrastructure of doctoral education; second, mediate some problematic tendencies of neoliberal academia and conceptually reconcile the tensions between care and independence in doctoral education.

Today the Swedish housing market is at the heart of growing socioeconomic inequalities, due to the record high profits that could be made through “housing careers” in the past 20 years of upward housing prices. At the same time, rising household debt has been one of the major threats to financial stability. This situation clashes with the historical ambition to maintain tenure neutrality, i.e., the foundational principle on which Swedish housing policy has relied upon to provide adequate and affordable housing for all. Critical housing and political economy research have shown how, in the past three decades, housing, fiscal and legal reforms have consistently moved the Swedish housing system away from the tenure-neutrality principle in favor of homeownership. This study contributes to this literature by analyzing the discursive component of the process that has progressively eroded the social status of rent tenure compared to homeownership, focusing on the period 2005–2022. We analyze the media discourse around the Swedish housing market drawing on selected articles from the five main national newspapers. To gain insights into how ideological shifts within the housing market are constructed, we explain how homeownership, price rises, and debt have been normalized in public debate, and whose voices on these topics are given space in the Swedish media discourse.

Den långvariga bostadskrisen i Sverige har gjort tillgången på bostäder allt mer begränsad på hyresmarknaden och allt dyrare gällande det ägda boendet. Samtidigt har osäkra och tillfälliga anställningsformer ökat i Sverige sedan 1990-talet. Både dessa trender ökar utan tvekan otryggheten i det dagliga livet för en växande andel av svenska hushåll. 

Denna rapport fokuserar på en central, men ofta förbisedd, aspekt av bostadsmarknaden, nämligen det ägda boendet. Mer specifikt redogör rapporten för bolånemarknaden i Sverige och undersöker villkoren och möjligheterna för de med osäkra anställningar i synnerhet. Rapportens övergripande syfte är att undersöka vilka aktörer och möjligheter dessa ställs inför i strävan efter ett ägt boende, och hur deras situation skiljer sig åt jämfört med dem med fasta anställningar.

Vidare diskuterar vi några kritiska konsekvenser av den ökade finansiella inkluderingen av atypiskt sysselsatta på bolånemarknaden, något som inte har blivit adresserat av existerande forskning. Materialet består bland annat av rapporter från Riksbanken, Finansinspektionen, bankers årsredovisningar, offentliga rapporter och relevanta aktörers hemsidor. Utöver det återfinns material från intervjuer (N = 13) med bankrepresentanter vi genomfört under 2023. 

The longstanding housing affordability crisis in Sweden has made access to housing increasingly difficult in the rental market, and increasingly expensive in the homeownership market. At the same time, precarious, intermittent, and temporary forms of work have also increased in Sweden since the 1990s. Both these trends are arguably increasing insecurity in the daily life of growing portion of Swedish households.

This study focuses on a prominent yet often overlooked side of the housing market, i.e. homeownership. Specifically, it accounts for the mortgage market in Sweden, and investigates the conditions and opportunities for those with precarious employments. The overall purpose is to examine which actors and possibilities this group is facing in search of owned housing, and how their situation differs from that of permanent employees. 

Moreover, we discuss some critical implications of the growing financial inclusivity of atypical workers in the mortgage market which have not been tackled by existing research. The material consists of reports form government agencies, annual reports from banks, public reports, and relevant actors’ websites. In addition, material from interviews (N = 13) conducted with bank representatives in 2023 is included. 

Policy mobility literature invites us to consider the power-laden processes of how urban policies are exported, mimicked, and transformed in different urban contexts. However, recent critique has highlighted the need for a fuller understanding of urban policy context to understand where and when policies come to be implemented in new settings and how they are transformed. The purpose of this study is to explore understandings of urban policy context in a comparative study of policy mobility, and specifically relations between internationally packaged concepts, local pilot projects and national level actors. We develop a framework for understanding these relations in policy mobility based on case studies of BID policy development in Sweden and Denmark drawing on both Policy Mobility literature and a Multiple Streams Approach. The main finding is that local pilots play a key role in translating packaged policy concepts but also serve as ‘proof of concept’ for further institutionalization. The way these pilots are discursively situated in relation to ‘problems’ is therefore of central importance for further implementation. Furthermore, the study highlights the role of policy entrepreneurs that connect local pilots (and discursive problems) with national level actors, and political opportunities.

This article offers an overview of neighbourhood-based BIDs (NBIDs) in Sweden. Swedish NBIDs tend to appear in stigmatized residential areas engaging with pressing sets of urban issues that have been longstanding concern of social policy. Their overarching goal is raising property values in neighborhoods on the edge between urban decline and (re)development potential. Emerging in a neoliberalizing institutional context, NBIDs present themselves as correctives to public-policy failures by promoting property-oriented solutions. The adaptation of the BID model in the Swedish ‘post-welfare’ landscape, however, exhibits, and arguably exacerbates, the shortcomings found in BID elsewhere. Their opaque institutional structure and lack of accountability contribute to curbing democratic influence over local development, thus reinforcing spatial inequalities. We argue that the growing political advocacy for the institutionalization of the BID model in Sweden presents a new milestone in the neoliberalization of urban governance, as private actors are promoted to legitimate co-creators of urban policy.

Why and how do artists engage in activities that likely lead to gentrification, despite their awareness of its effects and despite that they will possibly be among the displaced groups? I highlight a missing link in existing literature explaining the recurring patterns of art scenes and gentrification in US cities– the cyclicality of artistic careers trajectories in art scenes’ spatiality. The study shows that the shifted reputation of the neighborhood in early stages of gentrification is instrumental to positioning individual cultural producers in the cultural field through the local art scene’s collective accumulation of symbolic capital. Early-career artists accumulate symbolic capital through space. Paired with the capitalist and racist legacies of the US city, this contributes to reproducing gentrification. Theoretically, the article draws from Bourdieu’s theory of the cultural field and geographical literature of the symbolic economy. Empirically, it draws on interviews with cultural producers in Bushwick (Brooklyn, NYC).