From Housing Expansion to Vacancy: Urban Renewal and Shrinkage in Post-war Sweden

Sammanfattning

Sweden’s housing policies from the post-Second World War to the 1970s were grounded in the idea of sanering, slum-clearing and reconstruction, and essentially aimed at reforming regional planning. Through the sanering approaches, some regions changed their characteristics in a shrinking way. Nevertheless, previous studies rarely focused on either sanering or its impacts on regional development. Moreover, although the historical municipal mergers were conducted to reform planning during the same period, no study has examined their relations with the sanering. Therefore, the housing policies need to be reconsidered as the sanering policies and reframed from the perspective of regional planning and development. By using the urban shrinkage framework developed from Haase et al. (2016) and Hartt (2018), this paper examined what role the sanering policies played in municipal planning reforms led by the historical municipal mergers, and how they impacted regional development in the context of shrinkage. The case study of Kramfors provided two findings that extend beyond Kramfors, applicable to broader cases of shrinkage in Sweden. Firstly, in regional planning reform, sanering policies played a role in providing shrinking municipalities with ‘modernism’ as a vision of development, and sanering regulations served as a means of increasing population. However, during the period of sanering policies, a large number of vacant and abandoned properties were created, indicating the failure of population growth strategies. These phenomena were rooted in a municipal planning structure based on the premise of the immobility of residents and employment. Secondly, in relation to regional development, while the vacant/abandoned properties placed pressure on municipal finances, they were also leveraged as assets for regional development, both economically and socially, by facilitating the mobility of various forms of capital. Today, thousands of abandoned houses are estimated to exist in rural areas across Sweden. This paper indicates that the sanering policies hypothetically underlie their emergence. While the sanering policies’ period is known as a housing production or demolition period, it can be newly recognized as the vacancy creation period. The period can also be regarded to have contributed to the emergence of new approaches to shrinking regions by shifting the focus from immobility to mobility of various forms of capital.