THE NEIGHBOURHOOD IN PIECES: The Fragmentation of Local Public Space in a Swedish Housing Area (original) (raw)

In this article, we investigate the transformation of local public spaces in the ethnically and socially diverse housing area Norra Fäladen during 1970-2015. After being built, the area soon faced stigmatization and became known as a problem area. This was followed by a series of investments in local public spaces aiming for a stronger appropriation of the neighbourhood by its inhabitants. The production of a 'neighbourhood spirit' has, however, slowly deteriorated over the last two decades. Through the introduction of new areas, with large single-family houses on the one hand, and a densification of the existing housing stock on the other, the inhabitants' dependence on the existing (but now decreasing) public spaces within the area has been polarized. Local public spaces are also being increasingly relocated from central parts of the neighbourhood to the peripheries or outside the area. In this article, we investigate how this quite slow, yet steady, transformation has affected the local public spaces and the everyday life of the area. In Sweden, densification projects have often been localized to areas built during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1965, the Swedish Parliament decided that one million dwellings should be built between 1965 and 1974 (The Million Program), peaking in 1974 with 110,000 newly built units (Grundström and Molina, 2016: 323). At the time, this was the highest number of built units per capita in the world. The quality of the Swedish Million Program areas was often quite high in terms of the plans and standard of the apartments, and sometimes also the infrastructure of the public services, but they were criticized from the outset for their poor outdoor environments and large-scale and uniform design. In the decades that followed, an increasing critique of the Million Program areas also led to several waves of amendments (Hall and Vidén, 2005; Tägil and Werne, 2007: 65 ff). Many of the areas struggled with stigmatization and a bad reputation, and as a result, almost any kind of change was seen as good change; in fact, it seemed as if urban development in these areas could only mean improvement. The decades after the 1970s were thus characterized by upgrades, densification and infills (Kristensson, 2003; Hall and Vidén, 2005: 324). One hypothesis of this article is that over the decades, these densifications and infills have slowly amassed to effectuate large-scale changes, affecting for example the infrastructure of local public spaces. Rather than rethinking public spaces through the new urban developments, the densifications quite often seemed to rely on the original infrastructure of public space; that is, on the very resources that they were slowly eroding. The effects of deregulations and the abolition of state subsidies that followed in the wake of the Million Program have been described elsewhere (Andersson and Turner, 2014; Grundström and Molina, 2016), and so has displacement that often followed from the renovations of these areas (Baeten et al., 2017; Thörn and Thörn, 2017). Here, we aim to address how the often quite slow, yet steady, transformation that followed affected the infrastructures of public spaces and services in these areas.