Crisis and the Post‐Industrial City: Or is Malmö Building Yesterday's City Tomorrow, Again?

Abstract

This paper investigates the dialectics between urban planning, economic crisis and the build environment by looking at how the city of Malmö (Sweden) has responded to two different crises. First, the so-called industrial crisis was met with more industrial policies that exacerbated the problems and led the city into a severe crisis in the early 1990s. Then Malmö inverted its strategy and embraced the 'post-industrial city'. Nowadays, as the 2008 crisis has not seemed to have disappeared and the current economic situation is 'uncertain', the official rhetoric in Malmö is seemingly as optimistic as ever, as a new congress/concert hall, new shopping centres and new hotels are being built: the production of the post-industrial city continues with full force. By investigating the city-crisis dialectics and discussing theories on crisis and crisis management, inspired by Marx, Schumpeter and Keynes, this paper asks the question as to whether Malmö today is making a similar mistake as in the 1980s, that is, reproducing yesterday's city.

Identifying Context-Specific Categories for Visualizing Livability of Cities—a Case Study of Malmö

“…It then managed to radically shift its dependence away from heavy industries to a wider array of knowledge-based businesses in sectors such as bio-medical science, environment, IT, digital media, game industry and education [26]. Under stable political conditions and unchanging leadership between 1994 and 2013, 'work of vision' largely affected city development and planning including, for example, the content of successive updates of the city's Comprehensive Plan [30]. These visions, influenced inter alia by the Swedish economistÅke E. Andersson's 'K-society'-based on knowledge (Kunskap), capital (Kapital), communication (Kommunikation), and cul-ture (Kultur)-set the course toward a more creative and innovative urban fabric [30,31].…”

“…Under stable political conditions and unchanging leadership between 1994 and 2013, 'work of vision' largely affected city development and planning including, for example, the content of successive updates of the city's Comprehensive Plan [30]. These visions, influenced inter alia by the Swedish economistÅke E. Andersson's 'K-society'-based on knowledge (Kunskap), capital (Kapital), communication (Kommunikation), and cul-ture (Kultur)-set the course toward a more creative and innovative urban fabric [30,31]. Additionally, large-scale public investments including financial support from the national government contributed to the renewal of the city's built environment, from old heavy-industrial buildings to other kinds of structures such as eco districts (for example Augustenborg and Bo01), university buildings, and cultural complexes (for example Malmö Live) [30,31].…”

“…These visions, influenced inter alia by the Swedish economistÅke E. Andersson's 'K-society'-based on knowledge (Kunskap), capital (Kapital), communication (Kommunikation), and cul-ture (Kultur)-set the course toward a more creative and innovative urban fabric [30,31]. Additionally, large-scale public investments including financial support from the national government contributed to the renewal of the city's built environment, from old heavy-industrial buildings to other kinds of structures such as eco districts (for example Augustenborg and Bo01), university buildings, and cultural complexes (for example Malmö Live) [30,31]. As a result, Malmö has become a center for employment in innovative and creative industries and the population has increased rapidly.…”

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“…According to Corsetti (2012), the fiscal policy responses to the 2008 crisis have gone through two or three phases. In the first phase, focus was on avoiding another Great Depression, and the methods applied by governments led to the ‘Keynesian episode of 2008–9’ (Callinicos 2012: 74) – including fiscal stimuli and bank bailouts as well as various rescue packages, Keynesian investment programmes and fiscal regulations (Holgersen 2014). There was little or no concern about future deficit corrections; such ideas were considered irrelevant or counterproductive (Corsetti 2012).…”

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“…Even in a differentiated fashion, we find that local authorities are still relying and actively promoting the integration of finance and real estate in cities such as Dublin or Leeds (Byrne, 2016;Gonzalez & Oosterlynck, 2014). In Malmo the city is trying to build itself out of the crisis with more hotels and shopping centres (Holgersen, 2015); in Paris risky investment in infrastructure mega-projects is carrying on (Enright, 2014).…”