Governing Movements in Urban Space

Abstract

In order to understand the key strategies of urban policy in the context of the Swedish welfare state, the district Haga in Gothenburg is a highly relevant case. Haga has actually played a role as a reference point for Swedish urban policy in two distinct historical phases. In the 1930s, Haga belonged to the inner-city working-class districts that were objects of a public investigation, which laid the foundation for the national housing policy during the coming decades (Karlsson 1993). In the 1970s, the state-funded ‘cultural conservation’ of the district, linked to a redefinition of the area from a ‘working-class slum’ to ‘a histori-cal neighbourhood’, became an important reference in a major turn in Swedish urban planning (Holmberg 2006).