Modernist Suburbs and Their Missing Stories

Theme: Cities as Mega-Projects

Published: 29 February 2024

Summary
In this SCAS Talks episode, Associate Professor Jennifer Mack discusses the often-negative narratives surrounding modernist suburbs in Sweden and Denmark. Mack challenges these dominant perspectives by highlighting the positive experiences of residents, emphasizing the need for alternative narratives that reflect the lived realities of these communities. She discusses the impact of large-scale renovations and the unintended consequences of gentrification. Mack's research emphasizes participatory planning methods that integrate resident perspectives and incorporate historical memory. The podcast underscores the importance of nuanced storytelling and inclusive urban planning to create more equitable and vibrant communities, and also touches upon urban studies, architecture, and social justice.

Keywords
Million program, suburbs, urban planning, social transformation, architecture

Suggested Link/s
SCAS page: Jennifer Mack
Personal website: https://www.kth.se/profile/jmack External link, opens in new window.

Transcript of the Episode

Jennifer Mack 00:09
I think it's very important, especially because many people have a fear of million program neighborhoods or similar neighborhoods in other places, in Denmark and other places in Europe as well, that there is another, there's another representation, there's another narrative about them, because otherwise, the decisions that are made about them at the official level are based solely on the other version of events or the version of the story. And I think because there are other stories, we need to hear them in order to really have a productive, for example, planning process. We need new tools. We need to have ways of manifesting the care and the love that people have for their neighborhoods. I feel a sense of responsibility to bring in another perspective, so that those who are doing those kind of projects maybe can reflect a little bit more about what other approaches they might take.

Natalie von der Lehr 01:15
Welcome to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. My name is Natalie von der Lehr, and in this episode I talk to Jennifer Mack, Associate Professor of Theory and History of Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. She is a Profutura Scientia Fellow, and is in residence at SCAS during this academic year, 2023/2024. Jennifer Mack is particularly interested in post war European suburbs and how they have become symbolic spaces for political actions and social transformations. She is currently working on a project to craft alternative narratives about modernist suburbs. And this is the second episode in our theme "Cities as Mega Projects". Welcome to SCAS Talks and the studio, Jennifer.

Jennifer Mack 02:05
Thank you very much. It's nice to be here.

Natalie von der Lehr 02:08
Would you like to say a few more words about yourself?

Jennifer Mack 02:11
Sure, I am a scholar of architecture, but I also have a background in anthropology, so I've been for many years doing work that lies at the intersection between studies of the built environment in a more, I guess, traditional manner, historical and theoretical studies and ethnographic studies of the built environment using the methods and theories of anthropology. So a lot of my work has been about migration and its relationship to the city and to housing and to landscapes. And more recently, I've been looking at modernism more specifically, and suburbs that were built in the middle and late 20th century, and how they have become, as you mentioned, symbolic. They've become stigmatized. They've become a large part of political discourse, and as I've called them elsewhere, they've become kind of voodoo dolls. They are treated in the manner that I believe speaks both to their history and to the way that they are understood today as having some potency for the way that we understand social and demographic changes in European cities. And I've specifically been looking at Nordic examples.

Natalie von der Lehr 03:34
What kind of suburbs are we talking about? And could you give some examples of the ones you have studied?

Jennifer Mack 03:41
I have mainly been looking at suburbs, until this last year, that fall under the rubric of the million program. A program coming from the national government of Sweden, to build 1 million dwelling units in 10 years, between 1965 and 1974. And then more recently, I've been looking at similar suburbs, modernist housing and urban designs outside Copenhagen in Denmark in relation to a lot of the renovations and demolitions and privatizations that are going on in that country at this time. And a lot of the discourse around those suburbs is very similar to what we find in Sweden. And what's interesting is also how the actions that are proposed for them have developed somewhat in parallel, and that includes those three main topics, this privatization, renovation and demolition.

Natalie von der Lehr 04:42
We can talk about that in a little while. But first of all, I wonder, why is it that there are these very, very different pictures - the commonly perceived picture that these areas are dangerous and they're dangerous people, and it's misery, but at the same time, the people who live there say, I feel safe, and there are nice shops and nice people.

Jennifer Mack 05:01
One of my theories about that is that the stigmatization began when the projects were still being constructed, and there were a number of journalists in the 1970s who had an anti-modernist agenda and wrote a number of articles about the neighborhoods that were then being built under this project, the million program. I found some research also by psychologists from Stockholm University, where they described the neighborhoods in very negative terms, both in terms of the architecture and urban designs, but also just in terms of the opportunities for a full social life. And what I found is that there was this idea that they could be evaluated through this snapshot in time when you might even find construction vehicles still on the site. So obviously, they're not exactly child friendly environments. There was a very famous example of this "Rapport Tensta", about the neighborhood of Tensta, outside Stockholm, which also had a number of photographs included to accompany the text. And there you see even the angles from which the photographer decided to take the photos, demonstrating, you know that, oh, there's a child with this large crane perched over his head. You get the idea that there was some kind of bias involved in the way that the representation was imagined, even before it took place. And so I became very interested in looking at those reports and understanding that this discourse developed in the 60s and 70s. I mean, particularly in the 70s, this created an idea that these neighborhoods are failed. And it also feeds into a larger international discourse about modernism, that modernism is ugly. Modernism creates unlivable environments. Modernism was a mistake, and I think that it's all about context and it's all about representation. Because, you know, you can find plenty of modernist buildings in inner city environments that are not understood in the same way at all. What's interesting is the way that you know, if you historicize these ideas, and you you start looking into, as I have, into the way that they developed, and the way that they were written about at the time that they were built, you can see that they, in a way, never had a chance. And that also, as I've written about in another article, created an environment in which they were understood to be incomplete. And so therefore there were a lot of renovation projects that started in the 70s. They started doing renewal projects the year after the million program was complete. So there was a lot of government funding for these kind of projects. And I mean, certainly a lot of the there were good ideas, and maybe especially regarding the landscapes, a lot of the money was spent on the housing. So there it was also positive that they could maybe plant more flowers or plant more trees or bushes, and maybe build a pergola and a better playground and such. So I'm not saying that these are bad things. But I think it's very interesting that there was an idea of that they were incomplete and that this was something that needed to be remedied. That idea and that framing of the neighborhoods, both in Sweden and in Denmark, as far as I've seen, continues into the present day. They're not finished. They never became what they were supposed to be. The people who were supposed to live there either left or never arrived, and there is a feeling that they need intervention. They need to be remediated. Of course, it's great if you're providing new amenities for people, but if you're understanding an environment where somebody, as I've written about in an article called "Impossible Nostalgia", you're going into a neighborhood where people appreciate public work of art, and someone who I interviewed called and tried to have the municipality fix work of art that had been out in the elements for many years and no one had maintained it. Can somebody come and maintain it? And instead of coming and doing something to benefit the work of art, they simply took it away. You know, this is not an isolated case. I mean, I go through several others in that same article, and these are everyday happenings. So I think the idea that there's nothing good there is really pervasive, and that that is, in many ways, I believe, very dangerous, because it creates an idea that you can do whatever you want, and that there's nothing valuable, and that nobody values it, and that in everyday life there is tragedy. I might ask you also the same question, since I know that you've done some work on Gottsunda, I understood that you had a similar experience when you were talking with people that there were other ways of understanding Gottsunda than the way that the media does.

Natalie von der Lehr 10:20
Yes. So Gottsunda is a suburb in the south of Uppsala, and it's one of these million program housing areas, and the understanding you get from the media is that it's a dangerous place. People shoot each other, and they are not nice, and there's a lot of criminality and misery and many unemployed people and so on. And then I've worked for a long time, I did my PhD, and also worked there later, at the Agricultural University of Sweden, and that is quite close to Gottsunda. So a lot of people, a lot of students who study there, a lot of people who work there, they actually live in Gottsunda, or near that place. And from them, I got always the impression it's a very nice place, more than that, it's near a very nice nature, very nice landscape around them, a lot of small shops and a lot of activities going on for young people, for old people, and so on. So quite a rich social life in the community. So that was my first point there that I didn't really understand this gap. And then when I started off as a journalist, this thought came up again, and then I thought, now in my new role, why don't I look at this? And I took the bus out there at several locations to talk to people, to look at different aspects, and did a feature series. And it was really fascinating. First of all, they were very happy that media was coming there, because they said, usually they don't come. They write about burning cars, about shootings, but they never come. They don't put their foot here, although it's really just five kilometers down the road. Was very nice. I was welcomed with open arms, and I found a lot of engagement for this part of the city, and a lot of passion, really, to mediate that picture. And there was somebody who said, for every person who does something bad here, because things do happen. I mean, there is some criminality, there are some cars burning now and then, but for every person who does something bad, they're at least hundred you do something good. And that really stuck with me, because that's also what what I saw.

Jennifer Mack 12:23
That's one of the issues. I mean, obviously the stories of people being shot and so on, they're true, but they're only one part of the picture. And there's crime in the inner city too, and that doesn't get the same outside attention.

Natalie von der Lehr 12:39
But also, since I did this feature series, I think this was 2011, 2012 somewhere, there a lot of things have happened there. You talked about renovations or about renovictions, and that's also the case. I mean, they've shaped up the center a bit, so it's more modern, like this center where you go shopping. But also in the surrounding flats, I have a friend who lives there, and they recently did a full renovation of the whole block, so to say, and a lot of her neighbors had to move out because they can't afford the rent any longer.

Jennifer Mack 13:10
Yeah, and that's happening all over Sweden, which, as you mentioned, other scholars have called renoviction, or "renovräkning" in Swedish. It's a major phenomenon here now, and also the international companies that are buying Swedish housing and, you know, either reselling it or renovating it so that the original inhabitants can no longer afford the rents, is a process of gentrification that leaves a lot of people without viable options.

Natalie von der Lehr 13:42
What type of interventions are there? We talked about the renovations, renovictions, what else is being done in the suburbs? In

Jennifer Mack 13:50
In Sweden a lot of my work has been about renovations and how there is an idea of participation also, which I think is a really beautiful idea, if it works. And people are supposed to come and potentially provide planners or landscape architects or architects with ideas about things that they would like to see happen in their neighborhood. And then those ideas in theory will be used in future plans. But I think what I have observed, and there have been other scholars who've written about the way that these participatory planning processes have not really fulfilled the promises that they have made a lot of the time. For example, I found a process where, you know, only five girls were interviewed for a very large renovation of a public park. And I mean, I'm not saying that the results were bad, but I think it's interesting that it's promoted as having had a participatory planning process behind it, and that was also because it was very hard for the landscape architect who was involved to actually be able to make contact with people, or get people who wanted to talk with her about that project. So I think that there are barriers also to being able to create a good participatory planning process. But then when something like that happens, it's very difficult to say that it was actually based on like community desires. In some of my work, I've also called for the inclusion of memory in planning processes that it shouldn't just be about, you know, meeting people and trying to find out what they want for the future, but also talking with them about the past and trying to understand what, how they have experienced an environment over time, because there are a lot of people who have lived in million program areas, who have lived there for a very, very long time. I also thought it was interesting talking with people who had grown up in million program areas and potentially moved to other places, but had often very fond memories of their childhood. You know, in a traffic separated environment, being able to run across a field, no parents controlling you, you know that you could actually have a lot of freedom as a child because of the planning, because there were no cars to worry about. So these kinds of images, you don't see them very often, and they're not promoted. So I think that those in relation to renovations, perhaps could become a bigger part of the discussion, and that requires a different kind of participatory planning process. I guess you know, it requires people to have a different kind of conversation, and not just bring a map and like, where do you want your barbecue pit? But then in some of the planning, the renovations that I also have studied, I found that there were cases where a consultant group came in and they discussed with local residents, what do you think we should do under the rubric of safety, "trygghet", because that was where the money was coming from. It was like a project from Boverket that then was distributed to a municipality. And so the idea behind the planning process was, we need to improve safety. We need to improve public safety. So they came in with that agenda. And so whatever plan they create is going to be framed in that way. We have to increase safety, and that meant that the participatory planning process that they enacted was then framed with those kinds of questions. And what I found very interesting, looking closely at some of the reports, was that there were some cases where people said, I don't think it's unsafe. I think it's unsafe in the town center. Can you do something about that? And the proposals were not aligned with those comments. Instead, they were okay. We need to increase visibility. So let's get rid of all the bushes that you can't see around. Let's level all the hills so that you can have clear sight lines. And then, when I looked at how people responded, they had this comment area where they were able to put in their own comments. And it wasn't a yes or no question, you know, they were saying things like, why did you take away this and that we wanted to keep that sandbox or the barbecue, so it becomes very one dimensional. And I think the problem is everybody involved, obviously, is trying to do something good. They want to help people, and they want to make it better. But I think the framing that it's an unsafe place, we have to make it safer, it filters out a lot of other kinds of comments. And I mean, if I can then talk about Denmark, it's a totally different situation.

Natalie von der Lehr 18:45
Yeah. So what's it like in Denmark?

Jennifer Mack 18:48
They have had for many years these reports about different neighborhoods that the government sees as needing intervention, but since 2018 they've been doing this very active process, which is originally framed through this report called "The parallel society plan", where they labeled certain areas as what they called ghettos. And hard ghettos are those that have been on the list for four years or more, and the hard ghettos were required to do a number of very serious interventions by the year 2030, in order to be removed from this list, one of the conditions is you cannot have more than 40% family social housing. And so this has been very, very serious in terms of neighborhoods that had almost 100% family social housing. What do you do? In some neighborhoods, they have demolished buildings, even when residents have tried to protest. There have been residents that have even taken the Danish government to court over this. There have been other neighborhoods, one of the ones I've been studying outside Copenhagen, where they're doing a very extreme form of infill. They have a row house module that they're using, and they have very beautiful courtyards where, in fact, one of the leading modernist landscape architects was active and had actually designed these courtyards and the landscapes around the buildings that were also designed by one of Denmark's leading modernist architects. So they, the two of them, developed this plan together with other architects and landscape architects, but in those courtyards, they are now going to put in many, many row houses, which will be very close to the original mid rise housing that is in that area. It's interesting to see the pressure that the planners are under to deliver on this by the year 2030, and this means that they have to act in a very large scale manner, and very quickly. It's like an emergency. They have to do these projects as fast as possible. And then I found also that there are a number of private actors coming into the picture, real estate developers, who are getting in on the projects. And these row houses, for example, that I mentioned, they're sold to private individuals or private families, and they have an agenda that in order to be able to buy them, you have to promise that you're going to somehow give back to the neighborhood. I think a planner I spoke to, he gave me an example that one of the people who would be moving into a row house had some experience as a soccer coach, and maybe would be able to coach a team in this neighborhood. But then they have no guarantee that, then they won't sell to another buyer who has no interest in doing anything like that. And there's a lot of pressure on the housing market in Copenhagen. In many ways, it's not unattractive to buy a place like that. They're, they're also building other kinds of social housing for students and for elderly people, which is another way of getting around the regulations. But I think there's a very heavy handed approach in Denmark, which we've seen now in Sweden has has been discussed with admiration by leading Swedish politicians that this, you know, we'd like to be more like Denmark. So I think this could be something that we'll be seeing here. And we already do have a list with categories where neighborhoods are categorized. Riksrevisionen did a list in 2020 based on reports or interviews with police officers, where we have these vulnerable areas, and especially vulnerable areas and risk areas. So there's a kind of taxonomy around those, and so far, they've been mostly used to define which areas need more police support or intervention or police officers. But you can easily see how that can be transformed into a planning project at the national level. And we've seen also, there's been discussion mostly discursive thus far, about demolishing different kinds of buildings in Sweden, coming from major politicians.

Natalie von der Lehr 23:16
So immigration is an issue in politics at the moment. What role does immigration and ethnicity play in the suburbs?

Jennifer Mack 23:25
Thank you for the question. I think this is a really important question, because I have seen the ways in which the built environment and questions about migration and who belongs have been linked, both in Sweden and in Denmark. In the parallel society plan from 2018 there was, of course, the main factor that identified or was used to label certain neighborhoods as ghettos, or hard ghettos, as they called them, in the parallel society plan, and that was the number of or the percentage of non western background residents. Which they say, is the residents from non western countries. But there's no list of those countries. So this was used as a determinant and a factor that then is the basis for evaluating whether or not these neighborhoods should be classified in this way, because then you also have to fulfill other factors. But all of them have this non western label, or a percentage of non western residents. So it's clear that there is a kind of racialization of the suburbs, this idea that they're largely the place or the domain of people who have migrated has become a dominant image, which I actually think is really interesting, because, as we discussed before, the neighborhoods were stigmatized even earlier, before migration was really a major factor. Mustafa Dekec has written about what he calls the "Badlands of the republic" in France, where he shows that there was a transformation from white hooligans who were living in suburban places to racialized hooligans, and that this happened, you can really see it in popular cultural contexts, in media. So I would say a similar process has happened in the Scandinavian countries, where you can really see that in the 70s, the representation of youth gangs or violence that were ascribed to many suburban locations were ascribed to white working class, especially youth. So I think in the case of the legislation, you see that it really has been about statistically defining the areas as problems because they have residents that come from other countries, that this is treated as a causal link between social problems and migration. So I think it's actually very dangerous, because we can say that it's not clear why it's a problem to be a migrant, but it's treated as an unequivocal problem. And then in Sweden, in the last election campaign, of course, the then migration minister, Anders Ygeman said that there should not be neighborhoods with more than 50% non-nordic residents. Again, you know, a very fluid category that it's unclear you know exactly who would be included. So these kinds of categories, again, I think, reinforce the idea that it's a problem to be non-nordic. It's a problem to be non-western, and if there's a concentration of people with that background, as defined by the state, actually in an unclear way, because there is no list of countries, that then you can categorize the neighborhoods where they live as problems as well.

Natalie von der Lehr 26:57
So why is it seen as problematic that you have a concentration of so called non-nordic or non-western people in the same area?

Jennifer Mack 27:05
As an American coming to Sweden, I've been asking myself since my dissertation project, because in the United States, of course, we have a long history of immigrant neighborhoods such as Chinatown, Little Italy, these kinds of places where there was also an understanding that new migrants were helped by those who had arrived earlier. For me, this with respect to migration, was something that I understood to be a positive development. You have an enclave that means you get kind of social support, and you can come and participate in a society, maybe even start working earlier. And when I did my earlier research in the city of Södertälje, with the Syriac Orthodox Christian population there, those kinds of welcoming conversations and also facilitation of entry into the society were happening between new and more established migrants there. So I have always been very curious about why this is the case. And I mean, in Sweden, for instance, there's been a long tradition of thinking of it as a problem. There was this, I believe it was in the 1990s "Hela Sverige" - concept the whole of Sweden, where you were supposed to make sure that new arrivals, especially refugees, did not concentrate in any particular neighborhood, or that they were not even in geographic locations that were too concentrated, that they should be all over Sweden. So I think this idea of spreading people around as a means for integrating them has been a major part and component of policy in Nordic countries for a long time. But for me, it seems antithetical to the idea of social support that you would be able to get from potentially family members, or at least people who may know the context from which you came and how they made their way in the new society. I don't really understand that perspective. I try to understand it because it's part of my research. But I think it would be interesting, too, as a thought exercise, to try to imagine how you might conceive of policy with the opposite perspective. What might we gain from that?

Natalie von der Lehr 29:28
We've talked a lot about these existing narratives, and I think our listeners can get that they're problematic. But just to sum it up, why is it important to craft an alternative narrative about these suburbs?

Jennifer Mack 29:43
Well, for me, it has become really an agenda, because I observe the pain that people feel when their neighborhoods are disparaged, or when they're renovated and things are removed that they love and appreciate and feel at home. And having too many of these painful conversations, you know, as in interview contexts, or while doing, I was doing gardening with one group for a while, I've been doing a lot of observation in different capacities over my years of working with these kinds of neighborhoods. You know, just understanding how rarely you hear anything else or see anything else, then this dangerous, ugly, suburban representation has made me believe that it's not just that I'm trying to present some sort of naive perspective. Oh no, it's great there. It's perfect. You know, that's not what I'm saying. But I think the fact that we can't hear anything else and we can't see anything else is a real problem in terms of understanding the future of these neighborhoods. Because I think that there are a lot of people, I mean, who you met in Gottsunda, also who appreciate them. You know, the 100 versus the one. I think that we don't hear from the 100. We hear from the one, or we hear about the one. And I think it's very important, especially because many people have a fear of million program neighborhoods or similar neighborhoods in other places, in Denmark and in other places in Europe as well, that there is another there's another representation, there's another narrative about them, because otherwise, the decisions that are made about them at the official level are based solely on the other version of events or the version of the story. And I think because there are other stories we need to hear them in order to really have a productive, for example, planning process. And as I said, I really believe that people involved in those projects to renovate, you know coming from the municipality, especially that they really do mean, well. I'm not going to say that about the risk capitalists or real estate developers, necessarily. I mean, some of them also have a very strong social agenda, but I think that they're, you know, they're, obviously, they're out to make money. But when it comes to people who are really involved in and dedicating their lives to, you know, working with neighborhoods of the million program, or of, you know, the modernist suburbs of Denmark, you know, I really think we need new tools. We need to have ways of manifesting the care and the love that people have for their neighborhoods. I feel a sense of responsibility to bring in another perspective, so that those who are doing those kind of projects maybe can reflect a little bit more about what other approaches they might take. You know, I do a lot of teaching also at the architecture school. I bring these discussions also into our courses when I can, so that students who very likely might end up working on some project in a million program area someday, maybe they'll remember one of my essays or my lectures about these topics. And I think that's for me why it's critically important to continue to bring these yeah, as you say, craft these alternative narratives.

Natalie von der Lehr 33:31
Let's talk a little bit about SCAS to round off with. You are a Pro Futura fellow here and in residence right now during this academic year, 23/24. What is your experience of the multi- and interdisciplinary research environment here at the collegium?

Jennifer Mack 33:48
Well, it's absolutely amazing. I can't say enough about how privileged I feel to be able to be here every day and to meet the people who are here to go to these seminars, where people may be talking about something that is absolutely completely, on its surface, unrelated to what I'm working on. But then somehow you feel inspired anyway, and maybe there is some strange connection that you can find. I'm blown away by how everybody is so friendly and intelligent and engaged and supportive, and you can have a conversation randomly about something over lunch, where someone who may be in a totally different discipline recommends an article that you might want to read, and in a couple of cases, it's completely changed my perspective on something. It's just an incredibly supportive and friendly environment. And I don't know if I was really expecting that it would be like that before I came here, I knew that people would be very impressive, but I didn't know that they would be so generous, and I feel like the generosity actually is a good definition of SCAS in every way. I just feel like it is an environment in which intellectual generosity is everyday fair, and it's just wonderful place to be.

Natalie von der Lehr 35:28
Thank you very much for joining me here in the studio and our listeners, of course.

Jennifer Mack 35:32
Thank you very much for having me. It was a very nice conversation.

Natalie von der Lehr 35:42
And thank you for listening to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. This was the second episode in our theme "Cities as Mega Projects". And I've talked to Jennifer Mack, Associate Professor of Theory and History of Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm. We have talked about her research about urban suburbs, in particular in Sweden and Denmark, and the need for alternative narratives. In the previous episode within this theme, we heard Carol Upadhya, visiting professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore, about the rise and fall of the mega city project Amaravati in India. SCAS Talks features a broad variety of topics, which is a reflection of the multi- and interdisciplinary research environment. We're sure that there's something of interest for everyone. Tune in, find your favorite topic, or surprise yourself with something new. As always, we're very happy if you can recommend SCAS Talks to your colleagues and friends. Subscribe to us and you won't miss any new content. SCAS Talks is available on podbean, Apple podcast, Spotify and mouse podcast apps. I would like to thank Jennifer Mack once again for talking to me and thanks to you for listening. Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai