Envisioning sustainable lifestyles in Stockholm’s urban development

The urban development in Stockholm, Sweden is an obvious example of the materialisation of the idea of a compact and traditional city as the sustainable city. This paper develops on this theme using the ongoing planning and development of the area Årstafältet in the south of Stockholm as example. With the central planning documents as empirical material, this paper investigates urban discourses that construct and give meaning to an area as urban/suburban, including the role of green space. The city and the urban are today better understood as ideological constructions than descriptions of a place or lifestyle. However, the city/country (or urban/suburban) division still lives on in planning. Årstafältet, on the edge of the inner city is interesting in this context, since it is currently being transformed from a typical Swedish post-war suburb into a post-modern 'urban area'. Its green space is also being re-conceptualised as a "world class park". At the same time as the urban has been coined the "quintessential floating signifier", urban densification and functional mix are considered the solutions to almost all problems. Certain constructions of the city and the urban lifestyle have an undisputed status, and others are given the role of the problem to be solved. In Swedish cities the problems to be solved are often found, or located, in the periphery. The suburb that used to represent the most modern in welfare state urban planning now represents its failure. This paper investigates how planning practice responds discursively to these representations