Based in interviews as well as analysis of planning documents and media coverage, this article scrutinizes the role of property in urban morphology by tracing two decades of attempts to redevelop Norra Sorgenfri, a partly deindustrialized area almost at the topographic centre of Malmö, Sweden. In this city, urban redevelopment projects are centrally placed within a hegemonic story of Malmö as shedding its industrial past to become a sustainability forerunner. This was the story that Norra Sorgenfri was inserted into, with initial visions underlining its potential as an exciting extension of the inner city. But in targeting this 45 ha piece of land, Malmö also planned to transform a landscape subdivided into a complex pattern of mostly private properties alongside some scattered lots of municipally owned land. Scrutinizing property in Norra Sorgenfri and how particular property owners have reacted to redevelopment efforts, we centre on the significance of this lack of municipal land. Rather than merely asserting that property matters, we thus strive to trace how property matters, to planners striving to realize visions for a future Malmö, to different land-owners in the area, to the unhoused seeking refuge on post-industrial land, and to the authorities tasked with removing them.

Based on ethnographic observations, this article seeks to empirically illustrate how one of the main functions of the Smart City Expo in Barcelona in 2024 is to perform smartcity-as-ideology and its technological-solutionist stance that considerably narrows our understanding of urban problems and the solutions for it. The article introduces the Expo and describes our arrival and visit to the Expo. It provides empirical detail of the performativity of technological solutionism and its optimism, including the role of alliances, based on ethnographic observations. The main features of the technological-solutionist ideology underpinning the smart city are summarised and we conclude how this performativity is in line with Althusser's understanding of ideology.

The article addresses the simple but pertinent question of why ambitious urban planning visions slowly lose a significant share of their aims during the implementation phase and why there often occurs a significant time span between vision and implementation. Using the development of the deindustrialised Norra Sorgenfri neighbourhood in central Malmö, Sweden, as an example, the author enquires into why developing the area became so complicated, and why the original vision, with its focus on social sustainability, largely disappeared despite private developers having invested in land acquisition in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Based on document analysis of the vision for Norra Sorgenfri from 2006 and the subsequent planning programme from 2008, as well as interviews with planners and property developers, this article seeks to highlight the mechanisms due to which the implementation of the Norra Sorgenfri plans differs from original visions and strategies, as well as examine why the process was so slow. The authors conclude that the planning office’s ‘visioning’ becomes powerless in the face of ‘property-led regeneration’ where private developers have most of the decision-making power, and that the ‘social sustainability’ ideal cannot be achieved through physical regeneration alone. 

Research on displacement has a long trajectory in Western geography and urban studies. In a Swedish context theory formation around displacement re-emerged in the 2010s as a response to an increasingly heated housing market, increased gentrification and growing homelessness, and as a consequence of ‘renoviction’ processes. Learning from empirical research in Sweden, the Nordic experiences differ from the Anglo-American context, and set ground for a theoretical discussion on how to understand the specificities of displacement processes in (post-)welfare societies. In this chapter we investigate some Swedish manifestations of displacement that cannot easily be grasped by conceptual apparatuses often developed in an Anglo-American context. The process of displacement in a Swedish (and Nordic) context is often more indirect and slower but its eventual outcomes have the same damaging effects on its victims. The chapter provides both an historical and contemporary view of Swedish displacement processes and practices, and we argue that we cannot uncritically import a conceptual apparatus that grew out of other socio-spatial contexts and develop particular understandings of displacement based on Nordic empirical observations.

Boken Bostadsmanifest – 22 krav för framtidens hem samlar 25 forskare och aktivister som vill bidra med att skapa en bostadsmarknad för alla. Deras 22 krav utgår från kunskap och erfarenhet från både forskning och aktivism, där författarna efterlyser en aktiv kommunal och statlig socialt inkluderande bostadspolitik.

Boken ska inspirera medborgare, politiker och aktivister med nya erfarenheter, forskningsresultat och visioner i bostadsfrågan. Kraven placerar hemmet i fokus som en viktig plats i alla människors liv. Bostaden är mer än en marknadsvara, den är en rättighet.

Bostadsmanifest är en uppföljning och utveckling av boken 13 Myter om bostadsfrågan (2016), författad av forskarkollektivet CRUSH – Critical Urban Sustainability Hub.

Nu har fler vänner bjudits in till att medverka till detta mångsidiga manifest där steget tas från kritiska reflektioner till visioner om en framtida välkomnande stads- och bostadsplanering.

Bostadsmanifest – 22 krav för framtidens hem är illustrerad av seriekonstnären Daria Bogdanska, författare till den hyllade serieromanen Wage Slaves. Boken är formgiven av Magnus Frederiksen.