The Power of (Re)Attachment in Urban Strategy: Interrogating the Framing of Social Sustainability in Malmö

Abstract

Based on a critical examination of Malmö's new development strategy, this paper discusses the power of attachment in urban strategy, with a special focus on the ideological framing of social sustainability. It argues that the social sustainability agenda has less to do with its practical purpose of equalizing living conditions in a segregated city and more to do with its ability to mobilize people under a future vision through attachment to a fantasmatic narrative. The fantasmatic construction of the ‘future city’ helps promote ideological closure, but the fantasmatic vision is not tantamount to a utopian ideal that transcends participants' self-interests. The paper analyzes urban strategists' communication of visionary planning ideas, such as the idea of social sustainability, as a ritual practice that generates an abstract uniformity through people's consensual appropriation of schemes. At the same time, the appropriation of schemes affords the participants a space of resistance which could turn the power of attachment into a politics of reattachment that critically engages with—and politicizes—ideological constructs that relate everything to a single vision.