Spatial, Financial and Ideological Trajectories of Public Housing in Malmö, Sweden

Abstract

ABSTRACT Public housing has been one of the primary tools mobilized in Sweden historically to fulfil citizens’ right to housing. However, the nominally universal character of public housing in the Swedish context has increasingly been circumvented through processes of segregation, residualisation, gentrification and displacement. Furthermore, previous housing research points to the neoliberal shift of Sweden’s housing politics since the early 1990s, encompassing the deregulation of public housing at the national level. Focusing on the example of public housing, this paper argues for a multiscalar and nuanced understanding of housing neoliberalisation in Sweden, by investigating the change of public housing locally. The political landscape of public housing in different localities has been transformed as a result of interacting trajectories of spatial restructuring, financialisation and ideological reconstruction. The paper examines this “conjunctural” transformation empirically through a case study of public housing in the city of Malmö.