Envisioning sustainable lifestyles in Stockholm’s urban development

Tunström, Moa and Smas, Lukas and Perjo, Liisa (2016) Envisioning sustainable lifestyles in Stockholm’s urban development. REAL CORP 2016 – SMART ME UP! How to become and how to stay a Smart City, and does this improve quality of life? Proceedings of 21st International Conference on Urban Planning, Regional Development and Information Society. pp. 857-861.

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Abstract

The urban development in Stockholm, Sweden is an obvious example of the materialisation of the idea of a compact and traditional city as the sustainable city. This paper develops on this theme using the ongoing planning and development of the area Årstafältet in the south of Stockholm as example. With the central planning documents as empirical material, this paper investigates urban discourses that construct and give meaning to an area as urban/suburban, including the role of green space. The city and the urban are today better understood as ideological constructions than descriptions of a place or lifestyle. However, the city/country (or urban/suburban) division still lives on in planning. Årstafältet, on the edge of the inner city is interesting in this context, since it is currently being transformed from a typical Swedish post-war suburb into a post-modern 'urban area'. Its green space is also being re-conceptualised as a "world class park". At the same time as the urban has been coined the "quintessential floating signifier", urban densification and functional mix are considered the solutions to almost all problems. Certain constructions of the city and the urban lifestyle have an undisputed status, and others are given the role of the problem to be solved. In Swedish cities the problems to be solved are often found, or located, in the periphery. The suburb that used to represent the most modern in welfare state urban planning now represents its failure. This paper investigates how planning practice responds discursively to these representations.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: urban , visions, sustainability, discourses, Sweden
Subjects: H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor
P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Depositing User: REAL CORP Administrator
Date Deposited: 22 Jul 2016 09:49
Last Modified: 22 Jul 2016 10:14
URI: http://repository.corp.at/id/eprint/178

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