Going Whole Hog : Merging Ecobranding and Park Politics in the Smart City

Thoroughly shaped by an industrial past, Sweden’s third largest city, Malmö, has always prided itself on its many lush and accessible public green spaces. Historically significant, centrally located, and generous in size, the numerous green areas still lead some to characterize Malmö as “the city of parks” (Pehrsson 1986, Malmö Stad 1994). However, although parks have played an important sociopolitical role in the city, their current function, especially given an increasingly important climate-conscious urban agenda, is less clear. As an example, a recent survey by Statistics Sweden of green areas in Swedish municipalities with more than 30,000 inhabitants showed the labeling of Malmö as a park city to be much exaggerated, if not downright misleading. Of the thirty-seven municipalities analyzed in 2010, Malmö was the city with the lowest ratio of publically accessible green area per capita, less than 100 square meters, as compared to the 350 square meters per capita in the city with the highest proportion (Statistiska Centralbyrån 2015). The study also showed Malmö to be a city still influenced by heavy industry and infrastructure, with a very high ratio of paved areas and with the second-highest percentage of inhabitants completely lacking accessible greens within reasonable distance. While the 2015 survey gives valuable indications about differences in land-use patterns, it focuses primarily on urban green spaces from a structural and quantitative point of view. In the survey, the functional value of urban green spaces and their importance as interwoven, balancing, and restorative elements are implicit. The idea of green structure thus also reflects an ongoing reconceptualization of a former nature-culture divide, now in terms of connectivity (Hellmund and Smith 2006; La Point et al. 2015). No longer seen as an enclosed park—and thus as a sociopolitically motivated discontinuity, correcting and reoxygenating the urban corpus—urban greenery is now seen as one of several support systems, not least from an urban ecological point of view. Yet, despite emergent green structuring, the public urban park lingers, presenting an intricate and unsettling otherness reflective of ideological currents, fluctuating common resources, and social mobilization. As a manifestation of a distinct and complex spatiotemporality, the urban public park might—more or less accidentally—constitute a sustained critique of an increasingly structured urbanity. Using as a point of departure the planning and execution of a park in “the city of parks”—the Emporia Rooftop Park in the smart city district of Hyllie in Malmö—this article discusses the park as a networked yet unsettling materialization in an increasingly “connected” process of urbanization. Suspended between different interests and conceptions of urban growth, this process could potentially provide room for a radicalizing of urban imaginaries. However, it also lends itself to compensational, aestheticizing, and increasingly instrumentalized justifications, thus emptying the park of its divergent, and therefore political potentials. As a new and highly visible eco-engineering arena, the urban park is instead rapidly converted into a privileged minion in a new, green, design-driven, and future-oriented environmental joint venture, the political positions of which are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish