A technocratic road to spatial justice? Examining the welfare landscapes of Swedish postwar planning,

Summary, in Swedish

Ongoing debates on spatial justice often highlight bottom-up struggles by movements making demands on the state. This kind of narrative certainly reflects the limitations imposed by decades of neoliberal reforms that have pushed back the formal influence of grassroots in many areas. With the hegemonic formation that sustained neoliberal rule in prolonged crisis, there are now more openings for radical politics than for some time. This makes it an urgent task to lay bare not only what forces might struggle for spatial justice but also in what forms spatial justice might be institutionalized. This paper revisits postwar spatial planning in Sweden in order to study how spatial justice became institutionalized in technocratic municipal bureaucracies. I argue that by shifting away from the planning of housing to a broader look on welfare landscapes one might glean tendencies in planning that often are neglected in studies of Scandinavian welfare states. In particular I draw on a case studies that shows how urban planning and what became known as leisure planning cohered in the late 1960s around visions of creating a landscape rich in possible uses for all residents. Not only where considerable resources marshalled and modes of planning experimented with to materialize this landscape in ways that still effect everyday life. This planning increasingly articulated notions of equality and justice as its explicit end, which provides an interesting example of technocratic statecraft playing an active role in the politics of spatial justice.

• Author: Johan Pries
• Department/s: Department of Human Geography
• Publishing year: 2019
• Language: Swedish
• Document type: Conference paper: abstract
• Topic: Human Geography
• Conference name: The 8th Nordic Geographers Meeting
• Conference date: 2019-06-16 - 2019-06-19
• Conference place: Trondheim, Norway
• Status: Published