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.

Transit-oriented development (TOD) has become a leading model of urban planning worldwide that promises to meet a broad range of local and regional objectives: improving mobility, expanding ridership, attracting investment, reducing urban poverty, improving quality of life, making affordable housing and fostering urban integration. At the same time, the implementation of TOD in many cities has raised concerns about gentrification, displacement, re-segregation, and more polarization. This article aims to shed light on these issues by bringing together previously disparate literature that mentions these contradictions and discusses policymakers' hopes and critics' concern for the implementation of a newly started TOD project in a universal housing system in Rosengard-a segregated, low-income neighborhood in Malmo, Sweden. Although policy advocates view the project as a significant development strategy for a more sustainable Malmo, there are also real concerns about gentrification and the potential displacement of low-income residents. Furthermore, the mixed-methods study showes how integration might be achieved, but concerns have arisen about the possible exclusion of the current low-income residents, which brings up issues of inequality, representation of poverty, and marginalization.

This book examines reasons, processes and consequences of housing displacement in different geographical contexts. It explores displacement as a prime act of housing injustice – a central issue in urban injustices.

With international case studies from the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, India, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and Hungary, this book explores how housing displacement processes are more diverse and mutate into more new forms than have been acknowledged in the literature. It emphasizes a need to look beyond the existing rich gentrification literature to give primacy to researching processes of displacement to understand the socio-spatial change in the city. Although it is empirically and methodologically demanding for several reasons, studying displacement highlights gentrification’s unjust nature as well as the unjust housing policies in cities and neighborhoods that are simply not undergoing gentrification. The book also demonstrates how expulsion, though under-researched, has become a vital component of contemporary advanced capitalism, and how a focus on gentrification has hindered a potential focus on its flipside of ‘displacement’, as well as the study of the occurrence of poor cleansing from a long-term historical perspective.

This book offers interdisciplinary perspectives on housing displacement to academics and researchers in the fields of urban studies, housing, citizenship and migration studies interested in housing policies and governance practices at the urban scale.

This is a themed issue about displacements. Or more precisely, about research grounded in narratives of people suffering displacement in its various forms, and their all too visible and yet oftentimes made-invisible demographics. ‘All too visible’ as those individuals or groups stand out either as scapegoats on which to lay blame for urban problems, or as the human fallout of ongoing processes of class struggles and racialised conflicts under neoliberal, neocolonial and neonationalist regimes of spatial encroachment. Yet, their subjectivity, agency and voice are invisibilised in public and political discourse, as well as in academic research, or they are altogether erased through the poor selection of methodologies that fail to capture the discrete statistical categories that can register displacement. Therefore, those afflicted by it become un-researchable. The papers within this themed issue collectively seek to re-center displacement, through investigations and narratives of displaced populations.

This chapter argues that measures herald a new era of urban population management and urban renewal in Sweden. It finds the term 'banishment' particularly useful to grasp the new urban renewal tactics that are unfolding in Landskrona. Based on an empirical study of Landskrona's rental policies, the chapter aims to develop banishment as a concept to capture a certain variation of displacement that is currently difficult to place in the available conceptual apparatus. It argues elsewhere that the reluctance of municipalities to accept citizens on low income may lead to the emergence of 'city-less citizens' who have nowhere left to go since no municipality is prepared to enrol them. Banishment may not have immediate tangible effects, but it forces the banned to consider whether they are worthy of being in a place and whether it is worth fighting for it.

This article scrutinizes the much used, but less examined, concept of ‘trickle down' in an urban setting. We make a distinction between the production of and distribution in the city, and argue that trickle down in contemporary urban policy could be regarded as the liberal link between production and distribution. Based on interviews with key figures and document analyses, we look at the transformation of the Swedish city of Malmö from an industrial to a post-industrial city, where, during the last two decades, we have found three concurrent components: the ideology of trickle down; several urban policy programs and governmental policies to ‘make' money and resources trickle down; as well as increased economic polarization and segregation. A liberal critique of trickle down would argue that market mechanisms cannot by themselves solve distribution, and that government policies therefore are needed. We argue for the need to go beyond a liberal critique of trickle down and stress how unequal distribution is built into the unequal production of the city.

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.

I tretton kapitel utmanas rådande problemformuleringar om vad som utgör hindren för att skapa en mer tillgänglig bostadsmarknad och rimligare boendesituation åt alla. Är ökad marknadsekonomi lösningen på bostadsbristen? Måste vi sänka kvalitetskraven för att alla ska få tak över huvudet? Hur hänger bostadsfrågan och frågan om integration och segregation ihop? Är gentrifiering en naturlig förändring av staden? Rådande "sanningar" om fler avregleringar, lägre skatter och ökad marknadsfrihet har kommit att stå i vägen för nytänkande. Det behövs fler röster i debatten. 13 myter om bostadsfrågan ger alternativa tolkningar som kan föra in nya perspektiv på bostadskrisen. Boken ges ut av Förlag Dokument Press, med illustrationer av Sara Granér.

Large-scale urban development projects (LSUDPs) are embodying the diffusion of an entrepreneurial approach into urban policy and consequently to planning, with the built environment being transformed into spaces oriented towards specific users and uses. For planning practice, this entails including urban forms and discourses that support exclusion and polarization in planning projects. This paper asks how physical planning promotes and/or hinders spatial and socio-economic integration in these projects. The analysis focuses on two UDPs in Malmö, Sweden. Official planning documents, interviews with public officials and the media are used to illustrate the discourses and practices built around these projects to glance over aspects of equity and integration in a city that is plagued by socio-economic and spatial segregation. The paper contributes to the discussions on implications and dilemmas for physical planning derived from the adoption of entrepreneurial approaches in urban policy.

Det här är en handbok som skrivits för att användas praktiskt i kampen om hyresrättens framtid. Boken har växt fram ur gemensamma erfarenheter av att ta strid mot renoveringar med höga hyreshöjningar som följd. Det har gett oss både kunskaper om lokal organisering och en övertygelse om vikten av att hyresgäster ska ha rätt till att påverka framtiden i de bostadsområden de bor i. De senaste åren har vi kunnat se hur hyreslägenheter renoveras med omfattande hyreshöjningar som följd. Konsekvenserna har blivit att många hyresgäster har tvingats flytta, ibland från bostadsområden de bott i under lång tid, då de inte längre har råd att betala hyran. Om inte hyresgäster går samman och kräver sina rättigheter kommer inget förändras och flera tusentals människor tvingas flytta. Den här handboken ska användas som ett praktiskt verktyg för lokal organisering. Vi som har gjort den här boken är engagerade i olika rörelser, några av oss är också forskare med inriktning mot bostad- spolitik och stadsutveckling. Boken har tillkommit genom en kollektiv process, där många varit inblandade för att bidra med sina erfarenheter och perspektiv. En lista med alla medverkande inklusive de rörelser som står bakom den här boken finns lägst bak.

The city of Landskrona in the South of Sweden has never fully recovered from a phase of heavy deindustrialization during the 1970s and 1980s. After years of socially inspired plans and projects, the local authorities have now decided to shift gear and tackle problems of criminality, unemployment and social exclusion through a renovation and eviction plan of the inner city. The basic thought behind the plan is to radically alter the social fabric of the inner city through major alterations of the housing market. The “Crossroads Centre/East” plan proposes that the municipal authorities, together with five real estate companies, form a new company to renovate houses, convert rental apartments to condominiums, demolish and rebuild. One hundred million Swedish Crowns are invested in the company – 95 million will come from municipal funds. The proposal in the City Council, led by the Liberal Party, was supported by 49 out of 51 Councilors, including the Social Democrats and the extreme right-wing Sweden Democrats. The aim is not hidden: welfare recipients should be actively steered away from the city center and make place for a (imaginary) wealthy middle class. The overall objective of the company is “to improve both the physical and socio-economic status in Landskrona’s central and eastern parts." To understand this urban renewal proposal, we would like to present Landskrona as an example of a watershed in Swedish housing politics that forces us to consider: 1) the nature of gentrification processes in Scandinavia – from gentle to brutal; 2) the shift in viewing affordable housing as a problem, rather than a solution; and 3) the possible introduction of ‘renoviction’ in Sweden.

Focusing on the establishment of the first European Trump Golf development – on the Menie Estate along the Scottish North Sea coast – the paper contends that neoliberal planning, understood as state interventions to allow individual entrepreneurs to realise their visions, reshapes both planning practice and the socio-ecologies governed by planning in problematic ways. Neoliberal mindsets here cause politicians to depart from previously established practices. The paper analyses how governance becomes tied up in questions of entrepreneurial freedom and with beliefs in the capacity of an individual entrepreneur to steer the fate of the region.

This paper presents the prospects of viewing ‘sustainable mobility’ as a merger of seemingly opposing values and ideas into a coherent and fully emplotted myth. Myth, in this sense, is not a false story meant to amuse or discredit, but rather a story based on naturalised beliefs giving it the supremacy of the obvious. Through the process of emplotment, myths create internal logics that help relieve anxiety, rationalise behaviour and naturalise societal and individual convictions. As such, myths are a fundamental and habitual part of life. The myth of sustainable mobility is not one, but two stories – that of development as quantitative growth and the discourse of sustainability – which are merged, emplotted and naturalised. It is based on the fears of economic and environmental collapse, but while fear is an essential characteristic of myth and a source of much of its power the myth also offers hope. The hope lies in the promise of continued trends of increased mobility while still being able to preserve the world for ‘future generations’. This entangles the very notions of mobility, development and sustainability, creating a confusion of concepts as the contrast between growth and limits wanes. Rather than setting biophysical limits, sustainability becomes a justification for continued growth – green growth, sustainable mobility.

Neoliberalism may be a widely used term in both scientific and popular writings, but there remains much confusion over what its exact contents are – Brenner, Peck, and Theodore (2010a) have called it a ‘rascal’ concept but confirm elsewhere (Brenner, Peck, & Theodore, 2010b) that it remains a ‘keyword for the understanding of regulatory reforms of our time’. Smith (2008) has declared neoliberalism ‘dead but dominant’, and some call for a shift in focus from analysis and critique to the exploration of possible postneoliberalisms (see for example Brand and Sekler (2009) in the theme issue on postneoliberalism in Development Dialogue).

This chapter tries to demonstrate how the Urban Development Project of Hyllie in Malmö, Sweden, has normalised neoliberal planning practices that were pioneered in the first UDP in Malmö, Western Harbour, a spectacular development of housing and offices, symbolically built on former shipyard grounds in the early 2000s. Closed architectural competitions, compliance in the local press, a focus on the very construction of the project as a main motivation, the virtual absence of social matters, and the virtual absence of debate, dispute or disagreement altogether, have become ordinary elements in the planning of larger development in the city. But there is no clear break with the ‘social-democratic’ Malmö that precedes the current institutionalisation of neoliberal planning. The Hyllie project borrows heavily from the 1960s Million program’s architectural and design language, and shows a similar impatient drive to ‘build away’ the past (impoverishment, deindustrialisation), head for a similar modernist future that would erase social divides, and, this time, populate the city with cosmopolitan open-minded creative educated liberals.

This comment on Larner's (2011) article deals with the political power of certain conceptualisations of neoliberalism and questions the Anglo-American ways of reading the history of neoliberalism. The inclusion of key moments of neoliberalisation and crisis outside the Anglo-American world would provide different readings of the processes of neoliberalisation. The ‘choice’ of crises matters for our understanding of the contemporary neoliberal condition.

The geography of urban deprivation is both real and ‘imagined’. The combination leads to biased and often quite polarized views of cities, their dynamics and their future. Unfortunately the tendency is to depict poverty and deprivation as ugly, as an ‘improper’ part of urban life which should be eradicated and replaced by ‘proper’ middle‐class physical constructions and social structures. But research which avoids the ‘imagining’ shows that this is an unacceptable view of the the inner city where in fact people, despite their poverty, set up a wide array of social, cultural and economic networks of real meaning, which enable them to enter the labour market, to develop mutual support and to participate in cultural activities of all kinds, just like anybody else.

This paper questions the 'peculiar epistemological framework of problems' (p. 107) through which the city has come to be considered in the academic and policy arena, in politics of both the Left and Right, and in urban sociology, planning, architecture and other areas of urban study. Baeten argues that contemporary terminology, for example, displays a negativity towards the city, a fear of the unknown city, by turns explicit (in a discourse which favours a lexicon of 'exclusion', 'deprivation' and 'polarization') and implicit (an 'urban renaissance' presumably emerges from an urban Dark Age). In these current projections of dystopia the author identifies parallels with 19th-century obsessions and frameworks of urban morality - the categorization of an underclass, and positioning of the city's poor as 'deserving' or 'underserving'. Baeten uses recent work on Orientalist constructions of the Other in a bid to contest such negative presentation of the city in current urban studies. There are interesting links here with Gil Doron's work in this issue of City.

This paper seeks to summarise the interplay between utopian and dystopian thinking throughout the twentieth century with a particular focus on the city. The gradually shrinking appeal of the socialist utopia and its replacement with the globalised free–market as a ‘revanchist utopia’ left socialist utopian thinking in a state of disarray towards the end of the previous century. Utopian thinking, both as a literary and political genre has been rendered marginal in contemporary political practices. Urban dystopia, or ‘Stadtschmerz’, is now prevalent in critical Western thinking about city and society. It is concluded that the declining political impact of critical urban research is caused partly by its lack of engagement with crafting imaginative alternative futures for the city. The works by Sennett, Sandercock and the Situationists, among others, may contain elements to reverse the current utopian malaise in urban research.

Drawing on evidence from the city of Brussels, it will be argued that much of today's urban governance discourses and practices contributes to anti-urban ‘clichés of urban doom’ and betrays middle-class, ethnocentric, sexist and racist prejudices about urban societies. Mainstream conceptions of urban problems and policies are modernist, white, patriarchal, heterosexual, nuclear family-minded, middle-class and suburban. Mainstream urban planning metaphors contribute to, instead of help to eliminate, sexist and racist urban politics. The uncritical use of concepts such as ‘polarization’, ‘exclusion’ or ‘poverty’ accords with the quest for urban purification by dominant groups in society, who seek to minimalize the urban experience of heterogeneity, otherness, diversity and urban unpredictability. The main contribution of this paper will be in trying to make clear how some key metaphors in contemporary urban planning disempower the already disempowered and in fact contribute to conservative urban politics, even when they are not intended to.

This paper seeks to explain the persistence of inner-city deprivation in spite of sustained regeneration efforts, through demonstrating how urban regeneration policies are embedded in peculiar political-institutional power dynamics that actually contribute to the further disempowerment of the already disempowered groups in inner cities. The reconstruction of the post-war planning history of one specific urban neighbourhood, the South Bank in central London, will allow to demonstrate how the constantly reworked urban regeneration models comprise specific power relations that have important repercussions for the success and failure of regeneration programmes. The focus here will particularly be on how the fall of the South Bank's prominent era of community-based development in the 1970s is firmly embedded in changing political-institutional frameworks that, after a spell of `community power', were soon to restore the power of the local cultural, political and business elites over the local regeneration agenda.

In this contribution, the new position of the city in the urban political economy will be considered in the context of the shifting realities that characterize an increasingly hybridizing and cosmopolitan global (dis)order. We shall argue that globalization is paralleled by a restructuring of the city and with an increasing importance of the urban in a context of intensifying inter-urban competition. The success of cities is dependent on their local 'embeddedness' in institutional and other networks of power. Attention will be paid to the role of local elites and to the need to forge 'growth coalitions'. We shall conclude that the formation of an inclusive and cohesive growth coalition is a key condition for the future development of Brussels in a context of intense inter-urban competition. However, this poses a host of political problems. Not in the least, the fact the new 'glocal' elites often refuse to partake in local institutional or political networks. The commitment to place that invariably comes with a greater 'local' institutional embedding which may militate against their global strategies and aspirations. The key question for 'local' politics then becomes one of how to forge networks and linkages that force 'glocal' elites to become inserted actively in the regional armatures of governance.

Regeneration practices in the EU district in Brussels clearly reveal how a mismatch has grown between Brussels’ economic and cultural globalization and its political-institutional parochialization. Brussels’ global mission is being inserted into well-tested local formats of urban governance that have existed throughout the postwar period. Local powerbrokers continue to form remarkable economic growth coalitions that are successfully manoeuvring through obstacles that would prevent them from cashing in on Brussels’ internationalized economy through property development. Any government strategy that would deal with the rapid internationalization of Brussels and the EU district - socially, economically, culturally or politically - is simply absent. Important segments of Brussels’ social fabric are excluded from participation in public political and cultural life. Meanwhile, the success of extreme right-wing parties - which are fiercely contesting the multiculturalization of Brussels - has risen to alarming levels, while different cultural groups in Brussels are de facto generating hybridized cultural expressions which might form the base of a new modus vivendi of community, citizenship, economy and politics.

This paper seeks to explain the persistence of inner-city deprivation in spite of sustained regeneration efforts, through demonstrating how urban regeneration policies are embedded in peculiar political institutional power dynamics that actually contribute to the further disempowerment of the already disempowered groups in inner cities, while the urban elites have been further empowered by the political institutional settings of post-war urban regeneration policies. Throughout the regeneration process, the definition of 'community' and its involvement in regeneration projects have been substantially altered. Special attention will be paid to the rise and fall of the South Bank's prominent era of community-based development and how the local power geometry has been reworked in the process. The paper discusses the pros and cons of contemporary 'partnership planning' on the South Bank.

It is argued in this paper that the orthodox sustainable transport vision leads to the further empowerment of technocratic and elitist groups in society while simultaneously contributing to the further disempowerment of those marginalized social groups who were already bearing the burden of the environmental problems resulting from a troubled transport system. Scalar redefinitions of the transport problem play a prominent role in the twin processes of empowerment and disempowerment. Furthermore, the contributions of spatial planning and neo-classical transport economics to the sustainable transport discourses will be critically investigated. The issues of transport inequality and transport poverty should be re-inserted into the dominant transport policy debates and practices.

Politics, institutions and regional restructuring processes: from managed growth to planned fragmentation in the reconversion of Belgium's last coal mining region, Reg. Studies 33 , 247-258. Taking the example of the contested closure of Belgium's last coal mines in the Province of Limburg and the subsequent tumultuous attempts to reconvert the region's economic base, the paper assesses the importance of the political armature in structuring processes of regional change under conditions of prolonged economic stress. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between supra-national (European) programmes and the negotiation of these with regional institutional power configurations, resulting in a new articulation of European and local scales of governance. In the first part, we shall summarize the recent political-economic history of Limburg and indicate the role of hegemonic political apparatuses in shaping development trajectories. In a second part, we shall detail the more recent epochal changes that have changed the political-institutional framework in decisive ways and altered the economic restructuring process. We shall assess the functioning of the recently evaluated First Programme (1989-93). Finally, we shall suggest why the Second Programme (1994-98) has been so unsuccessful in meeting its objectives. We conclude that a regional analysis and planning that ignores the subtleties of power relations, their institutional configuration and shifting power geometries will invariably fail to account for or influence regional socio-economic development paths.