Myten om den utarmade stadskärnan : En flerfallstudie om två kommuners upplevda relation mellan stadskärna och externhandel

This paper set out with the goal of comparing the perception of inner-city retail’s status with its factual status. A focus has here been made on the city centre’s relationship with external city-centres, due to it often being conceived as one of the primary causes for the stagnation of city-centres. After having conducted six interviews with two municipalities, a summary was made on their views on the status of their own city-centre and the status of Sweden’s city-centres in general. The results were then analysed under the theoretical framework of Amcoff et al (2015), who has proven that Sweden’s current retail geography is more nuanced than a black and white picture of an impoverished city-centre by the hands of external shopping. The comparison led to several conclusions. The foremost being that both municipalities had a more positive outlook on their own city-centre’s relationship with their external retail variants. In fact, elements such as online retail and commutation were viewed as greater challenges than external retail, which was instead firmly regarded as complementary to inner-city retail. Contrastingly, the idea of the city-centres’ impoverishment by external retail seemed to instead ring true on a national scale. Their interpretations on a local scale was therefore more aligned with the literature’s factual description. Consequently, this work has served as fuel to a discussion on the possible existence of “the myth of the impoverished city-centre”