Public Planning, Neoliberal Hybridity and Local Activism in Sundbyberg : Epochal Reconfiguration of Urban Development in Greater Stockholm

Which urban policy responses are deployed when a small social democratic municipality in a greater city region aims to be competitive for private investments in housing and the built environment? Which new institutional development arrangements are implemented for this purpose, in the wake of a decades-long hegemonic position of the municipal public housing company? This thesis draws on a qualitative case study design to approach such questions, and investigates recent urban development in Sundbybergs stad in Greater Stockholm to answer them. Theoretically, the thesis draws on a theory of neoliberal localization in combination with Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the social production of space. The thesis is thereby able to explain how the municipality consolidated political power, institutional infrastructures, and administrative capacities with a view to introducing a market-based paradigm of urban development. It argues that this paradigm became characterized by a neoliberal hybridity. It supports this argument by analyzing three major development projects targeting three areas with very different sociospatial characteristics. The thesis thereby demonstrates how market-based developments integrated a number of regulatory features and public planning interventions in accordance with certain objectives, concerns, and conditions. E.g., it reveals how the development of a 1970s Million Homes Programme area, Hallonbergen, relied both on an extended sale of public assets to support private developers’ investments with the objective of comprehensively transforming the area, and on extraordinary measures for ‘social sustainability’. It also reveals how the development of the original municipal town, Central Sundbyberg, was arranged in a municipal development company. This established a business-like format for political control and external expertise, while undermining public planning and clouding democratic accountability. This point is further emphasized by analyzing local inhabitants’ methods for contesting certain development features and land use proposals in this project, enforcing a re-politicization of a largely depoliticized development project. Ultimately, the thesis contributes new knowledge on the variegating forms of neoliberal urbanism through an atypical case of a subordinate city region municipality that historically has been characterized by social democracy, a large public rental housing structure, a public housing company with control of spatial planning, and working-class populations and industries