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.

Students at the Master of Urban Studies at the Department of Urban Studies, Malmö University, have the option to become a Research Intern at a research project at Malmö University or elsewhere. Students become a member of a professional research team and can gain invaluable research experience that will be of help later in their career. At the end of the internship, students present their research results and write a report. This publication contains four such reports written in the beginning of 2018. Anna-Riika Kojonsaari participated in the Critical Urban Sustainability Hub, or CRUSH. CRUSH runs between 2014 and 2019 and is a FORMAS Strong Research Environment that brings together 14 researchers from Malmö, Uppsala, Lund and Göteborg. It is a research platform with an international outlook on critical perspectives on urban sustainable development, and with a prime focus on Sweden’s acute housing crisis. Its overall focus is the housing crisis (and related urban issues: displacement, eviction, gentrification) seen through the lens of weak groups in order to provide discursive space for those groups in science and media. Rather than defining the current housing crisis as a mere housing shortage that can be built away, it defines the crisis as a crisis of housing inequality and housing polarization. In that way, it seeks to highlight power relations and injustices at work in the housing market. Maja Stalevska and Dragan Kusevski participated in the research platform shifting conceptualizations of property in Sweden, a multidisciplinary research platform at Malmö University, that explores how different conceptions of property inform urban development. The starting point is that conceptions of property are highly normative, complex and span a field far beyond the strictly legal. Moreover, these conceptualizations have important implications for understanding for instance, the role and limits of urban planning, sale of municipal land, gating and the management and use of public space. Maja Stalevska and Dragan Kusevski have mapped and analysed the growth of BID-like (Business improvement districts) organizations in Sweden which is indicative of a significant shift in understandings of public space and its management. Kerstin Schreiber and Louise Ekman took part in Malmö Växer, a VINNOVA-financed project on urban cultivation led by the City of Malmö, in partnership with Malmö University. The project aims to find ways the municipality can coordinate urban cultivation in public space. Urban cultivation has been wide-spread in Malmö for many years, but the municipal organisation has not kept up with the rapid increase in interest and lacks ways to manage urban cultivation in all its different forms. Together with local stakeholders the project intends to experiment with different models of governance to ensure long term sustainability for urban cultivation initiatives. The project will also investigate ways to measure and evaluate the values and benefits of urban cultivation from social, ecological and economic perspectives.