Urban Responses to The Economic Crisis: Confirmation of Urban Policies as Crisis Management in Malmö

Abstract

It is common knowledge that crisis also signifies opportunity and opens spaces for change. When responding to the current economic crisis, is urban planning seizing this opportunity? This article investigates the case of the Swedish city of Malmö and explores its responses to the crisis by looking dialectically at the crisis, municipal planning policy and real‐estate capital. In this article, the local state and urban planning are regarded as social relations, with the aim of going beyond traditional formulations that oppose market (neoliberal) and state intervention (Keynesianism) as the main focus for crisis management. Against this background, the article shows that the 2008 crisis was met in Malmö by an active municipality that confirmed the existing visions and tendencies, rather than exploiting the crisis as a moment for changes and transformation. The article seeks to explain this by looking at the social relations that have constituted the urban policies in Malmö for the past two decades.

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

“…When the 2008 crisis hit Malmö, it was first met by shock and surprise among both public managers and real estate developers. Mayor Reepalu reacted to the situation by announcing that urban development processes were not to be stopped because of the crisis, and the municipality went into renegotiations of the prices on land sold to private developers, as the pre‐2008 prices where ‘impossible to manage’ (Holgersen ). The municipality went into meetings with banks, trying to convince them to continue lending out money despite the crisis, and several developers have claimed that everything became delayed for about one year, due to the crisis (Holgersen ).…”

“…Harvey has contributed with a more sophisticated analysis on how urbanisation was among the causes for crisis, developed through his over accumulation thesis (Harvey , ). The second perspective pertains how the crisis (unevenly) affects the city, in particular North American foreclosure cities (Aalbers ), but also European cities like Amsterdam (Engelen & Musterd ) and Malmö (Holgersen ). Others have described how it was especially hard hitting in ‘backyards’ as Eisenach and Leipzig and other places in East Germany (Bernt & Rink ) or focused on the relation between crisis and national urban policies in France (Pollard ).…”

The possibilities and limits of political contestation in times of ‘urban austerity’

“…Such thinking also extends to those accounts which view crisis as an 'opportunity' for societal and governing change (e.g. Harvey, 2009;Holgersen, 2014). While such accounts deepen the analysis of crisis they do not place the construction of discourses and mobilisation of rhetoric that is intertwined with crisis tendencies, and which relates to the subject, at the forefront of their analysis.…”

“green fix” as crisis management. or, in which world is malmö the world's greenest city?

“…This article seeks to contribute to the literature on (1) the links between the current crisis and urban policy, and (2) on general urban-ecological discourses. Concerning the former: despite an abundance of research on the causes of the global economic crisis and how it has affected cities Engelen and Musterd 2010;Aalbers 2012;Holgersen 2014), very little has been done to investigate the nexus of economic and ecological factors in urban crisis management in the current conjuncture.…”