Welcome to The Promenade City: A Gentri-Fictional Cartography of Stockholm in the Postindustrial Age

Abstract

As we enter the age of cognitive capitalism and immaterial labor, postindustrial cities like Stockholm in Sweden are witnessing the emergence of both a post-regulatory planning policy climate and the concomitant transfer of responsibilities for design regulation and housing provision from the municipality to distributed networks of producer–consumers. As governments effectively withdraw from direct engagement in city-building efforts, new divisions of labor and new forms of control thus become apparent. This essay considers the implications of these shifts by addressing the “gentri-fictions” through which they operate. Deploying notions of chora and “container technologies” as they have been developed through the feminist scholarship of Luce Irigaray and Zoë Sofia, we ultimately advocate a radical rethinking of our relation to the unobtrusive environments that facilitate our (compulsorily productive) experiences of the city and our participation in real-estate games of occupation and exchange.