Johan Pries

This thesis studies the complicated relationship between postwar social governance and neoliberalism. It looks at urban planning in particular because this is a key field of postwar social regulation as well as a strategic site of neoliberal reforms. The thesis examines urban planning paperwork from the Swedish city Malmö dating from the mid-1980s until 2015 with a particular focus on Folkets park, a green space in central Malmö. The main argument is that social regulation is neoliberalized, rather than ‘rolled-back’. This process cannot, the thesis argues, be reduced to a rapid burst of neoliberal political decrees in response to an exceptional moment of economic crisis. Instead, Malmö’s social neoliberalism was created by a slow process of re-articulation rife with tensions where the contingent outcome of continually erupting contradictions profoundly shaped the bureaucratic formation that emerged. Social technologies of rule were in Malmö meticulously repurposed for new ends and neoliberal technologies painstakingly grafted onto established bureaucratic routines over the course of three decades. Neoliberal urban planning was in Malmö not only shaped by residual social regulation, but also by how neoliberalism provoked new contradictions and inherited remnants of the postwar city’s urban spaces. This study of Malmö invites asking further questions about the continuing role of social modes of governing in neoliberal formations and suggests that neoliberal governance might be less vulnerable to a return of social regulation than some argue.

Beginning in the 1890s, workers’ associations and social-democratic activists in Sweden developed a series of People’s Parks (Folkets parker) that extended across the length and breadth of the country. By the the mid-twentieth century, nearly every city, town, and village boasted its own People’s Park. Built for relaxation and recreation, as well as for political agitation, Folkets parker also represented a significant expropriation and transformation of bourgeois landscape ideals and in the process became places where a new, working class-based folk, or people, could come to be. This paper traces the production of Folkets parker as landscape, focusing on the ways in which working people reworked landscape ideals in order to contest bourgeois constructions of Swedish national identity, while asserting their own power to shape that identity. We argue that working people traded in, and transformed, two landscape ideas – one rooted in bourgeois notions of the rural idyll and the other rooted in an older more specifically Scandinavian tradition of landscape as a shaped space belonging to those who shaped it. But we also show how, as the social-democratic state consolidated its hegemony in the middle-twentieth century, the underlying material basis for shaping the parks as landscape was transformed. Folkets parker became places primarily for recreation and entertainment and their status as shaped spaces that shaped identity faded.

The public memory of the social democratic welfare state in Sweden often emphasizes housing, but in fact post-war planning was far more diverse. One asset which postwar planning developed over time was a landscape that materialized a range of different concerns over welfare. Even today, the impressive investments in recreational facilities and green spaces made during the high point of welfarist planning in Sweden still provides the backbone of Sweden’s recreational infrastructure and areas for outdoor leisure and play. This paper highlights ‘leisure planning’ as a forgotten aspect of the postwar decades, and argues that the relationship between urban planning and leisure planning speaks to the patchwork character of the welfare landscape and explains why it remains elusive or even invisible in the current debate. We illustrate the making of welfare landscapes by analyzing developments in Upplands Väsby municipality, focusing on the complex interplay between leisure planning and urban planning from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Neoliberal urban governance is often framed as a break with the social statecraft of the postwar period. If we approach social government as a specific mode of biopolitical population politics, neoliberal reforms can instead be understood as re‐articulating the welfarist version of postwar social planning. In this article, I analyze how social urban government can become the basis of neoliberal planning through a study of the Swedish city of Malmö, which has shifted its approach from emblematic Scandinavian social democratic welfare urbanism to a particular kind of neoliberal planning. Malmö is a city where distinctions between desirable and unwanted populations are produced by municipal social planning that concerns itself with accumulating human resources. Postwar social planning technologies are thus re‐articulated as the basis for making space competitive for certain residents. This mode of planning is described as a type of ‘social neoliberalism’, which, instead of circumscribing neoliberal economics, extends the reach of neoliberalism into social government. This study suggests that calls for a return to social planning need to be complicated by accounts of how social government itself has been remade by neoliberal reforms. It also points out how the divisions produced by social neoliberalism expose powerful fault lines that reveal a terrain of political struggle.

This article explores how a series of heritage-driven renewal plans in the Swedish city Malmö dealt with a landscape deeply shaped by radical politics: Malmö People’s Park (Folkets Park). Arguing against notions of heritage where the past is essentially considered a malleable resource for present commercial or political concerns, we scrutinise plans for the People’s Park from the 1980s onward to emphasise
how even within renewal attempts built on seemingly uncontroversial nostalgic readings of the park’s past, tensions proved impossible to keep at bay. This had profound effects on the studied development process.
Established by the city’s social-democratic labour movement in 1891, the People’s Park is both enmeshed with historical narratives, and full of material artefacts left by a century when the Social Democrats had a decisive presence in the city. As municipal planners and politicians targeted this piece of land, the tensions they had to navigate included not only what present ideas to bring to bear on the making of heritage, but also how to deal with past politics and the park as a material landscape. Our findings point to how the kinds of labour politics that had
faded for decades became impossible to dismiss in urban renewal. Both political representations and de-politicising nostalgic representations of Malmö People’s Park’s past provoked (often unexpected) resistance undoing planning visions.

This article takes the work of David Harvey as an example of the valuable research being done in the space between geography and history. Harvey's influence is described as being significant in the canonical debates within geography that have had a far-reaching impact outside that particular field. His production is summarized from three different perspectives. First, his contribution to the theoretical debates in the 1970s and 1980s on the spatialization of Marxist thought, initially proposed by Henri Lefebvre, is discussed. Through the discussion of capital as a system that defers social instability through spatial production, Harvey has provided a range of concepts that have proved useful in both qualitative and quantitative research. As an empiricist, Harvey's findings illustrate the benefits of an approach informed by the theoretical perspectives that he and other spatially interested social theorists have developed. For instance, his work has opened up new avenues of inquiry through his study of cities and urban space in some of its modern and postmodern variations. Finally, Harvey's role as a public intellectual is analysed. While his position as a prominent and much quoted academic has undoubtedly ensured that the ideas he is associated with have circulated among social movements, it appears that it is his more open essays on the right to the city and the financial crisis, and not his more complex work, that has caught the public's imagination. This observation underscores the important role academics can play in the discussion of social questions, but also the limitations of repackaging complex issues in politically useful terms, and the vigilance needed by those who attempt to navigate these two modes of important knowledge.

Den kamp om Lunds gator som utspelades den 30 november genomsyrades av minnen av det förflutna. Vi har i denna artikel analyserat minneskulturerna hos 30 novemberföreningen och Lunds militanta antifascister genom deras kollektiva handlingar, för att visa vilken roll minnet spelade för rörelsernas sätt att interagera med varandra och det omgivande samhället. Båda rörelserna exemplifierar vad som kan beskrivas som ett ideologiskt historiebruk, där handlingar fylldes med mening och legitimerades genom uttryckliga hänvisningar till det förflutna. I synnerhet gällde detta för hur minnespraktiker fungerade legitimerande för att få tillträde till det offentliga rummet. Trots detta menar vi att det är viktigt att betona att de båda rörelsernas sätt att mobilisera det förflutna i kampen om Lund på avgörande punkter skilde sig åt. Vid en närmare studie framträder bilden av två rörelser med olika sätt att minnas det förflutna och förstå den egna rörelsens roll i ett historiskt förlopp.

This chapter addresses how shared experiences of action enable social move- ments to form new contentious performances. Departing from the discussion about the interpretative work of “transformative events”, we want to show how such events can be understood as shaped by experiences temporarily connected across time and space that are combined to form new modes of acting. Experiences of events where new modes of acting are tried can act as a powerful cultural resource, enabling a movement to eventually establish new contentious performances if recalled and repeated over time.

There is something troubling about the persistent debates about social exclusion. Focus on drawing the inclusion-exclusion line seems to make it difficult to gauge a critical understanding of that which is 'included' by social institutions. Simon Winlow and Steven Hall's recent intervention in this debate is a welcome contribution because it refuses this logic, instead focusing on the stakes of social regulation for both included and excluded groups. Taking this step back from the inclusion-exclusion binary opens up a very different, and very productive, approach both in terms of a critical policy review and the academic arguments it makes. Rethinking social exclusion is driven by a profound lack of satisfaction with perspectives that situate the most precarious sections of the working class as outside the social. The book swiftly dismisses what it takes to be the moralism of three dominant traditions labouring with the notion of social exclusion: conservative, left-liberal and social democratic perspectives. One could perhaps go as far as saying that Winlow and Hall declare war on the entire field they are engaging with, complaining that it is theoretically unstimulating, overly empirical and obsessed with shallow policy fixes, thus leaving systemic injustice in place. Recent academic and political preoccupation with the notion of social exclusion itself is accused of being superficial, addressing effects rather than the causes of deprivation and marginality. Winlow and Hall's response, following a broadly but at times unorthodox Marxist script, is certainly effective in that it clearly offers an alternative to the type of academic project they are trying to frame as obsessively safe and shallow. The book makes a good case for studies that dare to be more theoretical by placing the mechanisms and processes that produce social exclusion at the centre, rather than taking these as given. The argument advanced in Rethinking social exclusion proceeds through a series of short and easily digested chapters, each introducing a key discussion on social policy and social exclusion. The reader is first familiarized with recent debates in European social sciences. Then comes a critique of Charles Murray's Losing ground (1984), a foundational text for American neoliberal reformers. After this follow two brief chapters trying to tie together post-crash economics with neoliberal philanthropy and to reflect on the post-political predicaments after the neoliberal turn.

Samhällsplaneringen har i någon mån
alltid varit intresserad av relationella
flöden. Det bilsamhälle som cementerades
under efterkrigstidens rekordår var i
högsta grad en fråga om att styra rörelser
mellan olika platser med industrins behov
av arbetskraft som ledstjärna. Men, om
vi ser närmare var det inte bara regionplanens
trafiksystem som var relationellt.
Bostadsgården skulle skapa platser för
olika användare. Torg och stadsdelscentrum
var målpunkter för större områden.
Parker var ofta formgivna som gröna stråk
för att binda samman bostadsområden.
Och större fritidsanläggningar var designade
för aktiviteter som kunde dra till sig
besökare från ett helt lokalsamhälle.
Dagens dominerande stadsideal är i
mycket en reaktion på efterkrigstidens sätt
att tillhandahålla plats för relationella rörelser
av människor i, och mellan, bostadsområdet
som rumslig skala. Den nyurbanistiska
idén om en blandad och tät stad
utgår från efterkrigstidens vision om att se
och styra människors rörelser genom att
formge rum, men framhäver gatan istället
för området som en strategisk skala för att
förstå och styra dessa rörelser och uppnå
en vision av ett intensivt och sammanpressat
stadsliv. Detta allt tydligare fokus på
människors rörelser i staden utifrån gatans
”mänskliga skala” och de inramande
husen ”mjuka kanter” har vissa uppenbara
fördelar. Inte minst finns det idag en
mycket rik uppsättning designverktyg för
arkitekter och planerare att använda för
att forma denna slags relationer.
Men Sorgenfris omvandling i Malmö
belyser också några av denna modells
brister. Den mänskliga skalans raster
framstår i detta fall snarast som endimensionell.
Den gående människan blir
alltings mått, och alla problems lösning.
Det är de som ska skapa den Jane Jacobsinspirerade
trottorar-balett som ger före
detta periferi en framtida innerstadsidentitet.
Omgivande områdens socioekonomiska
segregation tas för givet, och
de kan på sin höjda kopplas ihop genom
miljöer för fotgängare.
Idén om den mänskliga skalan riskerar
också att göra att vi inte ser hur de allt
mer raffinerade verktygen för att formge
stadens offentlighet för fotgängare uttryckligen
kan användas för att iscensätta
väldigt olika slags relationella flödesgeografier.
Norra Sorgenfris offentlighet
är explicit formgiven för att boende och
arbetande ska kunna skapa täta band
till dess platsbildningar, samtidigt som
gaturummet tänks bära upp flyktigare rörelser
genom området för de som kommer
utifrån. Denna hierarki mellan olika slags
användare med olika slags relationer i den
mänskliga skalans stadsrum skulle inte
vara så utmanande om det inte vore för
att det lämnar ett problem olöst. Visionen
om spontana möten människor emellan
tänkta att ske i gatuoffentligheten i områden
som Norra Sorgenfri saluförs som lösningen
på den omgivande stadens segregation.
Inte mycket talar för att denna slags
platser, sina många kvaliteter till trots,
kan leva upp till dessa ambitioner.

Fredrik Gerttens film om rätten till städer och, inte minst, bostäder är inte bara visuellt vacker och medryckande. Push fogar samman en rad vittnesmål till en stark berättelse samtidens omöjliga livsvillkor. Vi får i rask takt stifta bekantskap med en serie människor som bokstavligen trycks undan och puttas bort av finanskapitalets cyniska spekulation i bostäder. Mot filmens slut går det att ana hur dess huvudperson, FNs punkigt charmiga sändebud för bostadsrättigheter Leilani Farha, försöker formera en slags motkraft för pressa tillbaka spekulationens värsta avarter. Push översätts kanske bästa som knuff. Eller kanske press. Möjligtvis tryck. Och Push är en berättelse om ett växande tryck som pressar undan och puttar bort människor. Metaforerna är lånade från den kritiska kulturgeografins vokabulär. Underinvesteringar skapar en över tid en växande skillnad mellan potentiell och faktiska hyresintäkter som formligen knuffar in överskottskapital fastighetsspekulation. Detta ökar trycket som tränger undan boende. Nyliberal ekonomisk ideologi har pressat tillbaka statens reglering från marknaden och släppt fram dessa krafter. Dessa hydraliska metaforer lägger grunden för en enkel, rak och stark berättelse. De krokar i varandra i ett narrativ om en rad sammanlänkande förändringar som smygande skett längs en och samma axel. Marknaden har tryckt tillbaka staten, människor har knuffats bort, kapitalet har, alldeles oavsett mänsklig vilja eller enskildas beslut, pressats in i nya sektorer och relationer. Svaret är, att som Leilani Farha och hennes allierade att trycka tillbaka spekulationen, knuffa på staten så att den tar ett större ansvar och sätta press på de som vill tjäna stora snabba pengar på fastighetsspekulation. Gott så. Gertten har fångat människoöden som förtjänar att lyftas ut ur tystaned, inte minst så att de som varit de stora vinnarna på de senaste decennierna fastighetsmarknad åtminstone kan förstå vem som betalat priset för deras privategendoms ständigt ökande värde. Och det behövs, utan någon som helst tvekan, en motkraft till hur våra livsmiljöer byggs, ägs och förvaltas. Filmens tag line har helt rätt om att "det är dags att trycka tillbaka". Men är saker och ting så enkla som Gerttens försök att begripa sig på den samtida kapitalismens fastighetsmarknad genom dess press och tryck antyder? En av 1900-talets viktigaste ekonomiska tänkare, den ungersk-österikiska filosofen Karl Polanyi, menade i sitt magnus opus att det gick att iaktta en pendellik rörelse där marknadens ökande makt provocerade fram samhällets självförsvar i form av statlig reglering av ekonomin. Många vill tro att vi, precis som när Polany skrev på 40-talet, är i en situation där pendeln kommer, eller skulle kunna, vara på väg att sakta in, stanna upp och börja förflytta sig tillbaka mot mitten. Allt som krävs för att trycket på människors livsvillkor ska lätta är, som Leila Farha menar, att motkraften byggs och blir starkare än pressen för avregleringar. Och det behövs press, tryck, knuffar för att förändra saker och ting. Om det råder det ingen tvekan. Som metaforer är trycket, pressen och knuffens styrka att de har riktning. De kan likt gymnasiefysikens vektorer adderas till en kraftfull total styrka, en berättelse om en pågående förändring där vi när vi puttar direkt kan känna åt vilket håll saker och ting rör sig. Men varken tryck, press eller knuffar har nödvändigtvis ett mål. De går att se dem i relation till en förändring vi vill

Den idag helt dominerande idén om den täta staden har en rad olika uttryck. Även i miljonprogramsområden får förtätningsprojekt olika effekt beroende på specifika omständigheter, inte minst hur förtätningar samverkar med andra större stadsomvandlingsprojekt—såsom storskaliga renoveringar av hyreshusbestånd och privatisering—och rent materiella utvecklingslinjer såsom ökad bostadsbrist, trångboddhet och ekonomiska klyftor. Välfärdsplaneringens grönskas tendens att vara organiserad i olika skalor gör visas områden lättare att förtäta, inte minst offentligt ägda flerfamiljshusområden, vilket i sin tur öppnar för en systematisk orättvis förtätning av de redan mest intensivt bebodda platserna i miljonprogrammen och lämnar samtidigt deras radhus- och villaområden orörda. Detta har på Norra Fäladen visat sig vara i princip omöjligt att pressa tillbaka, för att inte tala om stoppa. Offentliga platser såsom Borgarparken har istället visat sig lättare att ifrågasätta förtätningen av. Kanske beror det på att de så tydligt är just offentliga och därmed tänkta att gynna ett helt område, men i fallet Borgarparken visade sig att parkens rumsliga form spelade en avgörande roll. Parkens själva utformning, med gröna stråk och mindre platsbildningar utspridda i hela området i ett trafikseparerat nätverk av lummiga, offentliga rum som alla leder fram till större grönytor där offentliga funktioner som skolor, fritidshem, förskolor och utomhussportanläggningar samlas är svårt att förtäta utan att helt rasera parkens tänkta funktioner. Även om politiker i huvudsak är ointresserade av sådana argument har planerare och arkitekter i remissinstanser varit mer mottagliga, vilket i bästa fall kan ge dessa landskap en sista försvarslinje mot det växande förtätningstrycket.

The stakes of grasping how the far Right operates have not been higher for a long time. Hard Right racism is certainly nothing new, but a decade of third way neoliberal consensus gradually collapsing has left a vacuum that outright fascists are scrambling to fill. The analyses of critical geographers have much to offer in this urgent situation, where forging antifascist politics to defend democracy and the populations that fascists target has become a political priority. Geographers might help to critically dismantle the spatial foundations and implications of resurgent fascist politics. Critical geography can also make important contributions to an emerging history of the antifascist present by highlighting the translocal connections of the European antifascism much ongoing scholarship studies, unpacking the spatilities of movements often framed as a continuation of national resistance to 1930s and 1940s Nazism. This might involve looking at the decisive role played by diasporic communities and anticolonial radicals in the reinventions of European antifascism from the 1960s onwards, but also the more contemporary modes of translation and travel of ideas and practices to new situations evident in recent American mobilizations inspired by waning European tactics. Lastly, as I will argue in this essay, the geographic community can also contribute in a more concrete sense by mapping the spatial repertoires of fascist movements. Analysing the spatial practices and imaginaries of fascist street politics might prove a particularly useful way to help uncover vulnerabilities that antifascist movements in all their diversity might take advantage of.

Hastigt nedskriven analys av polisupploppet 23 augusti 2014 på Limhamn publicerad i det Malmöbaserade antirasistiska onliemagsinet Al-tid. Artikeln försöker förklara vad som tillsynes framstår som en paradox: att polisens våld mot vänsterradikala demonstranter i Malmö/Lund de senaste 20 dryga åren tenderar att vara som grövst när det ritkas mot ickevåldsprotester. Utifrån en skissartad beskrivning av den regionala prägeln på den autonoma vänsterns konfliktrepertoar och Skåne-polisens Police Order Managment System, förankrad i tidigare forskning, argumenterar texten för att polisens sätt att hantera ickevålds-protester arrangerade av specifcikt den autonoma vänstern ofta leder till ett mycket stort våldsutövande mot demonstranter. Artikeln avslutas genom att konstatera att detta riskerar att ha negativa konsekvenser för regeringens mycket diskuterade arbete mot "radikalisering".

"Kåldolmar och kravaller! Såhär i slutet av november har vi dykt ner i några historier kring 30 november. Vi talar med Johan Pries om kravallerna i Lund på 1990-talet och diskuterar kopplingarna till Danmark och gatans betydelse. Vi pratar också med idéhistorikern Petter Hellström om firandet av Kåldolmens dag, och Karl XII:s betydelse för nya kulturella influenser i Sverige på 1700-talet. Mycket nöje!"

The Industrial Workers of the World’s brief moment of strength in the late 1910s can perhaps best be understood as a laboratory of class struggle. New groups of workers found themselves center stage in American class politics by experimenting with methods that took advantage of their precarious position on the labor market. Most of the IWW’s organizational structures collapsed during the 1920s, but the syndicalist experiments lived on beyond what had been the Wobblies strongholds.

One of the many translocal circuits that wobbly experiences circulated along was the routes of mobility and migration that the IWW had drawn much of its strength from. How Swedish-born the IWW veteran PJ Welinder’s return to his native country, after being ousted as temporary IWW General Secretary in 1925, is an interesting illustration of how the Wobblies defeat precipitated translocal flows of political experience. Welinder join the sizeable Swedish syndicalist union SAC at the peak of its strength and instantly set to work in implementing the lesson he learnt in the US.

The SAC:s late 1920s strategy, seeking to appropriate the respectability of Swedish Social Democracy, had created tensions that Welinder soon became the primary conduit of. By drawing on the US experiences Welinder led a break-away group consisting of several thousand members attempting to try more flexible and contentious methods understood to emanate from the IWW. In this paper I examine the profound effects that the IWW experiments had across time and space by asking how “American Syndicalism” took root in and beyond the SAC from 1926 onwards.

The huge success of Swedish social democracy in the interwar years is often understood in terms of a tactical move towards the right. The stoking of anti-Soviet nationalism, an electoral alliance with farmer populists, and the abandonment of an orthodox Marxist line on socialization of capital by instead rearticulating liberal social policy are all taken as signs of this rightward motion. Marxist counter-arguments tend to focus on the intense labour militancy and a rise in union membership to highlight the role of class politics in this surge. While there has been interesting historical work on culture and civil society about this period, this debate has almost exclusively centred on the relationship between unruly and respectable everyday cultures of class.
I want to consider the little discussed history of two spatially interesting forms of civil society institutions in the decades leading up to the 1930s social democratic breakthrough: The People’s Houses and The People’s Parks. None of these institutions are unique to Sweden, but they appear to have been much more widespread in Sweden than anywhere else. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the scope and function of these institutions and discuss them as one possible factor in the social democratic road to power. In particular it seem that these sites rearticulated everyday geographies of urban culture in politically radical terms. The Peoples Houses and Parks could in this regard be considered powerful tools at a local scale, politically and culturally supporting the social democratic hegemonic claims on the national state.

In 1891 the labour movement in Malmö opened Sweden’s  rst “People’s park”. It would for many decades constitute a model for how culture and civil society could be mobilized politically to reinforce social democratic claims to hegemony, replicated in hundreds People’s park in towns and villages in the years that followed. What for decades was a powerful cultural and  financial resource for the labor movement began to lose its sway with the emergence of new kinds of youth culture in the 1950s, and after a long period of decline the debt-ridden institution was bought by the municipality in 1991.
This paper discuses how the park’s long and symbolically evocative history has been brought to bear on renewal plans for the park after its terminal crisis as an social movement owned space in the late 1980s. It argues that the past at times has been activated in fairly straight-forward fashion by material artifacts mobilized to prop up plans corresponding to visions dictated by present needs and vision.The past has also operated in plans in more unpredictable ways. In particular the persistence of spatial practices and representations formed in park’s mid century period has, often to the great surprise of urban planner, emerged in the planning process to unsettle redevelopment visions with striking consequences.

Urban planning is often understood as a sphere of expert knowledge. The visions for a future city this mode of expertise produces play a key role in the production of urban space. These envisioned futures however often fail to materialize exactly as planned, suggesting that resistance to specific plans can be an important site of political intervention.
In this paper I argue that the visions of urban planning must be understood as co-emerging with representations of actual space. Contemporary planning representations often operate through post-political language that de-emphasize conflicts. Still, that urban planning tends to focus on rectifying what is understood as existing ‘problems’ suggest that contradictions between actual and envisioned space is at the core of urban planning.
If the visions of plans co-emerge with representations of urban space in ways that articulate contradictions, the futures imagined by urban planning expertise might be understood as permeated by conflicts before ever facing resistance. To the external resistance against plans as a politically important problem, one might then add the internal contradictions that planning expertise articulates as a site for political interventions. Opposition developing outside neoliberal plans that connects with those that map and act within these internal fault lines of neoliberal planning expertise—like critical geographers—might then produce powerful political formations.

How neoliberal urban governance produces divided cities is a well-established research problem. "Attractive "and "connected" spaces are built to compete for demographics saturated by human capital. Areas inhabited by existing groups of residents understood to be less likely to contribute to the accumulation of human capital are simultaneously transformed by disinvestment and revanchist urbanism to spaces of deprivation. This bleak picture of class divisions being rearticulated as highly differentiated forms of attention to demographics across urban landscapes is, however, neither without its internal contradictions nor without possibilities of subversion. "Attractive spaces", being a kind of selectively enclosed commons, have a potential to be appropriated by everyday use and politically be redeployed beyond competition for human capital.
The neoliberal revolution in mapping and articulating desires through urban space have thus opened up new struggles over the city that cannot be contained to the defense of the last remains of Social democratic urbanity. Instead can James Fergusson's provocation to the left, suggesting that it search for subversive "uses" of neoliberal, help us hone in on what new horizons the neoliberal system opens up. By drawing on examples from archival work in Malmö, Sweden, will this paper focus on this emerging struggle over the right to attractive urban space developing as an everyday conflict from below and mediated through urban planning. Such conflicts over access to urban commons points to a contradiction within neoliberal capitalism, but also a potential to rearticulate its technologies to reach potentials well beyond the present conjuncture.

Social movements contesting property claims often strive to achieve legitimacy by negotiating with the state. There are also contrasting strategies of groups avoiding mediation by directly seizing control of spaces without making public claims as the basis for negotiations. Our paper seeks to address the representational tactics of such movements and thus complicate the image of direct action politics as non-representational.


We would like to discuss these issues by turning to the 187 days long squatting of a building on Ringgatan in Malmö, Sweden, in 1990. The squatters framed their action by embracing a highly confrontational style of politics, at the time unknown in the Swedish left’s consensus-orientated politics. This confrontational attitude did initially not lead to any actual acts of violence but still disrupted the negotiations with authorities. With no direct interaction between the police and activists were observations  of the drama acted out on the house’s roof from afar the only way for the police to observe their counterpart and produce the operational “police knowledge” needed to intervene.



The police decoded the small and inexperienced group of squatters, striking the same poses with the same "militant props" on almost all photographs from the time, as if the squatters were a well-established militant movement and based their tactics to this interpretation. Thus, the equally inexperienced police refused to evict Ringgatan until a complicated, expensive and well-rehearsed operation could be organized after six months of preparation. The squatters way of aesthetically framing their action, not negotiations yet modes of public representation, were thus a key aspect of the struggle over the Ringgatan house and a powerful intervention in the police’s work. This cultural framing bought the squatters over six months of access to the building and was a crucial tactic to temporarily suspending the dominant property regime.

Displacement of low-income groups is often directly carried out by those who stand to benefit from gentrification. What effects such actions by real estate owners have is, however, mediated by the state's regulation of space. The proposed paper tracks some ways that neoliberal urban planning can operate to provide "profitable" residents to landlords by taking claims of social responsibility, rather than openly revanchist policies, as a starting point.
With examples from Malmö, Sweden, is displacement discussed in regards to planning with distinctively social ambitions. Malmö's Social democratic heritage is then primarily not understood as a pre-history to the municipality's highly publicized claims of "social sustainability". Key planning innovations can instead be seen through other, less visible and less flattering, means of reworking social interventions.
Fragments of post-war social engineering directed at understanding and remaking "the poor" is in Malmö combined with neoliberal understandings of competition for human capital. This has allowed the development of a refined planning toolkit for changing the demographic composition of cities by pro-actively producing "attractive space". Social care has thus not been hollowed out, but instead redirecting at aiding the affluent as a means of attracting them to strategic sites.
These shifting models for producing social knowledge and social planning interventions allows for theorizing the state's role in the neoliberal displacement of low-income groups in new ways. It also identifies social knowledge and policy as a key area of potential contestation and subversion - be it by residents, grassroots groups or critical academics.

Increasing levels of urban conflict in the wake of the neoliberal financialization of space have in the last few years been articulated by political demands for “rights to the city” and academic inquiries into “spatial justice”. While this focus on open contestations of political rationalities are undoubtedly important factors in mapping the present socio-cultural production of space, less attention has been given to the more mundane contradictions of the day to day operations reproducing the neoliberal city.

The present paper proposes to study such everyday forms of conflict through its mediation by, and effect on, urban planning. Through archival inquiry into what planners “renders visible” new light can be brought on how everyday claims and practices affect the knowledge and interventions crafted by urban planning. Examples of how the grand schemes of redevelopment are shaped and disrupted by contentions in everyday life are collected from research on the last 35 years of Post-Fordist redevelopment of Malmö (Sweden).

These preliminary results pointing to the vulnerability of urban planning discourse are complemented by a proposed narrative approach to planning theory. While the city’s everyday contradictions are constructed as issues that draws the planner’s gaze to an area, planning as an expert knowledge must be able to narratively connect these problems to a potential of future “development”. Forms of contradictions that cannot be understood as containing a potential of development are thus excluded from the soft power of planning discourse, and dealt with by other, often more harsh, types of interventions.