Filling in the gap between the city and the periphery : Racialized spatial imaginaries of recent urban renewal in Malmö, Sweden

Summary, in Swedish

The massive renewal project of the Sorgenfri industrial
estate in Malmö, Sweden, has in many ways followed a familiar story of gentrification.
Artists, minority associations, cultural groups and small businesses have
been displaced from this disused industrial area by a city led urban renewal effort building high-end housing units. However, Sorgenfri plan has also been marked by an ambition to pioneer “socially sustainable” planning that might address city-wide segregation.

The new Sorgenfri residential area has from its inception been conceived of as “filling the gap” between the inner city and the peripheral, postwar housing estate Rosengård. This proximity to Rosengård, often stigmatized as the most extreme “migrant ghetto” of Scandinavia, has profoundly shaped the Sorgenfri plans and how the development is branded. The spatial design of the Sorgenfri residential area is understood as a way to blunt segregation by creating walkable pathways to Rosengård. By building a streetscape which generate new “meetings” and ”connections” in public space, Sorgenfri is intended to thus have effects beyond the local area by changing how residents in the city’s peripheries interact with the affluent city centre. Rather than being framed as displacement, Sorgenfri is thus marketed as flagship experiment in making urban planning more “socially sustainable.”

This two-decade long focus on creating pedestrian pathways has reframed city-wide segregation as a new kind of planning problem. Rather than addressing the racialized forms of spatial inequalities and the multiple relations between parts of the city, Sorgenfri has cemented a racialized imaginary of peripheries as insular migrant communities that need to be made more mobile. Interestingly, even this ambition to physically connect Sorgenfri to Rosengård with walkable residential neighborhoods has so not been followed through, making the new pedestrian connections more cumbersome to use than existing infrastructure connecting Rosengård to the the city centre.

The branding of Sorgenfri as socially sustainable planning addressing city-wide segregation has, crucially, enabled the city to divert public funds to Sorgenfri to high end urban renewal while claiming that the these directly contribute to blunting processes of stigmatization in the eastern peripheries of the city. In reality, these ambitions have very little effect on Rosengårds physical and other connection to the city center, but has bolstered the racialized rendering of Malmö’s peripheries as insular problem space disconnected from urban life. What remains of this experiment in social sustainability is, thus, publicly subsidized high-end housing, increasingly racialized peripheries and the displacement of artists, cultural groups and ethics association of postindustrial spaces of the Sorgenfri area itself.

• Author: Johan Pries; Miriam Negash
• Department/s: Department of Human Geography
• Publishing year: 2023-10-27
• Language: English
• Document type: Poster
• Topic: Human Geography
• Conference name: Gentrification & Displacement
• Conference date: 2023-10-26 - 2023-10-27
• Conference place: Boston, United States
• Status: Published