Based on interview material relating to the current wave of housing renovation in Swedish cities, this article will analyse the profit-driven, traumatic and violent displacement in the wake of contemporary large-scale renovation processes of the so-called Million Program housing estates from the 1960s and 1970s. We maintain that the current form of displacement (through renovation) has become a regularized profit strategy, for both public and private housing companies in Sweden. We will pay special attention to Marcuse's notion of 'displacement pressure' which refers not only to actual displacement but also to the anxieties, uncertainties, insecurities and temporalities that arise from possible displacement due to significant rent increases after renovation and from the course of events preceding the actual rent increase. Examples of the many insidious forms in which this pressure manifests itself will be given-examples that illustrate the hypocritical nature of much planning discourse and rhetoric of urban renewal. We illustrate how seemingly unspectacular measures and tactics deployed in the renovation processes have far-reaching consequences for tenants exposed to actual or potential displacement. Displacement and displacement pressure due to significant rent increases (which is profit-driven but justified by invoking the 'technical necessity' of renovation) undermines the 'right to dwell' and the right to exert a reasonable level of power over one's basic living conditions, with all the physical and mental benefits that entails-regardless of whether displacement fears materialize in actual displacement or not.

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It is argued in this paper that the orthodox sustainable transport vision leads to the further empowerment of technocratic and elitist groups in society while simultaneously contributing to the further disempowerment of those marginalized social groups who were already bearing the burden of the environmental problems resulting from a troubled transport system. Scalar rede nitions of the transport problem play a prominent role in the twin processes of empowerment and disempowerment. Furthermore, the contributions of spatial planning and neo-classical transport economics to the sustainable transport discourses will be critically investigated. The issues of transport inequality and transport poverty should be re-inserted into the dominant transport policy debates and practices.

The city of Landskrona in the South of Sweden has never fully recovered from a phase of heavy deindustrialization during the 1970s and 1980s. After years of socially inspired plans and projects, the local authorities have now decided to shift gear and tackle problems of criminality, unemployment and social exclusion through a renovation and eviction plan of the inner city. The basic thought behind the plan is to radically alter the social fabric of the inner city through major alterations of the housing market. The Crossroads Centre/East plan proposes that the municipal authorities, together with five real estate companies, form a new company to renovate houses, convert rental apartments to condominiums, demolish and rebuild. One hundred million Swedish kronor are invested in the company – 95 million will come from municipal funds. The proposal in the City Council, led by the Liberal Party, was supported by 49 out of 51 Councillors, including the Social Democrats and the extreme right‐wing Sweden Democrats. The aim is not hidden: welfare recipients should be actively steered away from the city centre and make place for a (imaginary) wealthy middle class. The overall objective of the company is ‘to improve both the physical and socio‐economic status in Landskrona's central and eastern parts’. To understand this urban renewal proposal, we would like to present Landskrona as an example of a watershed in Swedish housing politics that forces us to consider: (1) the nature of gentrification processes in Scandinavia – from gentle to brutal; (2) the shift in viewing affordable housing as a problem, rather than a solution; and (3) the possible introduction of “renoviction” in Sweden.

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