Normalising Neoliberal Planning: The Case of Malmö, Sweden

Abstract

This chapter tries to demonstrate how the Urban Development Project of Hyllie in Malmö, Sweden, has normalised neoliberal planning practices that were pioneered in the first UDP in Malmö, Western Harbour, a spectacular development of housing and offices, symbolically built on former shipyard grounds in the early 2000s. Closed architectural competitions, compliance in the local press, a focus on the very construction of the project as a main motivation, the virtual absence of social matters, and the virtual absence of debate, dispute or disagreement altogether, have become ordinary elements in the planning of larger development in the city. But there is no clear break with the ‘social-democratic’ Malmö that precedes the current institutionalisation of neoliberal planning. The Hyllie project borrows heavily from the 1960s Million program’s architectural and design language, and shows a similar impatient drive to ‘build away’ the past (impoverishment, deindustrialisation), head for a similar modernist future that would erase social divides, and, this time, populate the city with cosmopolitan open-minded creative educated liberals.