Johan Pries

I am an associated senior lecturer at the Lund University department of Human Geography with a multidisciplinary background in Geography, History and Urban Studies. My doctoral dissertation sought to come to grasps with what the strong tradition of Swedish social government through spatial planning means in neoliberal times by studying a large range of primary sources in the archives of Malmö Municipality. The dissertation’s main conclusion was that socio-spatial governance in Malmö partly has been re-aligned, rather than dismantled, towards neoliberal ends. Particularly the accumulation of human capital, by strategically refined investment and disinvestment in specific populations and areas, today appears to be the core social vision of spatial planning in cities like Malmö. This case highlights how neoliberalism might mean a re-invigoration of the darker sides of planning, with its origins in technocratic social engineering, rather than a final departure from it and poses troubling questions about notions of “social sustainability” as an emerging planning vision. 

In the last few years, my main planning research has been geared towards rethinking Scandinavian postwar planning, and what remains of it today as morphological landscapes and planning practices. Together with my co-researchers at SLU Ultuna studying high-modernist welfarist landscape planning, I hope to show that the way in which Swedish postwar planning dealt with issues like democracy, participation, culture, recreation, leisure calls for nuancing predominant views on this period’s spatial statecraft as a pure top-down project. Indeed, how agency defined as top-down or bottom-up politics is distributed by a contentious historical process seems to me to be a core question that remains to be thoroughly explored in urban and landscape planning scholarship, as it is in many other fields.  
 
A second strand of research I have been involved in is the spatiality of social movements and the political, cultural generative aspects of contentious politics. I have approached this issue by studying a broad range of cases in different historical and geographical settings together with researchers spanning a range of fields like Gender Studies, Digital Sociology, Human Rights Studies and Historical Geography. My main research on this field is at the moment about the early Scandinavian labour movement’s cooperative tradition of space-making, and how uneasily this history fits into the grand narrative of the Scandinavian welfare state and postwar social planning. My published work, however, mainly concern the translocal connections of more ephemeral contentious geographies such as housing activists squatting buildings, antifascist using blockades and anti-redevelopment protests.

At the present I'm involved in four major research projects, two of which I am the lead-researcher: the Formas-funded “Welfare Landscapes and the Compact City” based at SLU Ultuna, the Formas-funded ”Norra Sorgenfri planned, populated and problematized” based at Uppsala University, the Formas-funded “The heritage of popular movements” and the Vetenskapsrådet-funded “Prefigurative platforms, public spaces, and planning phenomena” about the Swedish People’s parks movement. It is my ambition to as much as possible embrace the tensions of thinking, writing and working with others across disciplinary, professional, national or societal boundaries. I am always interested in making space for new collaborative ventures, be it in terms of workshops with authorities, NGOs or activists, writing for non-academic audiences, teaching and lecturing on my work inside and outside the university, supervising dissertation work or mentoring students, or doing public research with unexpected collaborators such as social movements. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any question about possible common projects even if they seem outside the box.
 

At the moment I'm the lead researcher in two major projects, the Formas-funded "The heritage of popular movements" and the Vetenskapsrådet-funded "Prefigurative platforms, public spaces, and planning phenomena", both which deal with social movement spaces in Sweden since the late 19th century. I am also taking part in the two Formas-funded projects "The Welfare Landscape Reassembled led by Mathias Qviström at SLU and "Norra Sorgenfri planned, populated and problematised" led by Erik Jönsson at Uppsala University.