The city that the metro system built: Urban transformations and modalities of integrated planning in Stockholm

Abstract

This paper investigates how housing and public transport planning in Stockholm has been integrated during the past 20 years through multi-level collaboration. Drawing upon how Stockholm has been portrayed in the literature on transit-oriented development (TOD), that is, as a successful case of integrated land use, housing and public transport planning, this paper suggests that multi-level collaboration in Stockholm’s urban transformations has had its own challenges related to de-integration and reintegration. By including an exploration of the development of the metro system since the 1960s and onwards, the more recent processes of de-integration and reintegration emerge as endemic but often marginalised aspects of achieving TOD-like urban development. The paper contributes to previous studies by proposing three modalities of integration: (1) de-integration by agreement, (2) integration by collaboration, and (3) reintegration by intervention. These modes are not evaluative but should rather be used as a point of departure for future studies empirically investigating how integrated planning is achieved in contexts where transit-oriented development is contingent on multi-level collaboration.