Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

This thesis examines how the historical presence of female textile industry workers can be
envisaged in the urban landscape of Malmö. With the background of Malmö’s urban history
and transformation from an industrial town to a “City of Knowledge”, and an autoethnographic
method based on a framework of Critical Normativity, two case studies are performed.
The first one is on the stockings factory Malmö Strumpfabrik AB and the second
on the chocolate factory Marabouparken in Sundbyberg.
Women have played a major role in building the city of Malmö, but it remains coded in masculine
terms. The city is dominated by the large-scale structures surrounding the docks, the
extensive roads connecting these workplaces to the suburbs and thus the workers’ residences,
as well as a grey industrial landscape that lies just around the bend from most of the residential
areas in the city. At first glance Malmö is not a city characterised by the presence of a female
workforce. Taking part of the heritage of their historical presence in the environments
where they operated is a challenge today, as these have effectively been hidden by commerce
and large parking lots. Nonetheless, the role women played in building the fortune that was
necessary for the city to become what it is today, cannot be overemphasized. Urban planning
for the self-proclaimed “City of Knowledge” ought to affirm this.
This paper seeks to envisage the potential of Malmö Strumpfabrik AB and the possibility of
making the history of the female textile workers present in the urban fabric of the city today.
The narrative and history of Strumpan and Marabou, the materiality of their present and
historical conditions, and my own walking through this, figuratively and factually, exposes a
potential in recognising the history of the female textile workers of Malmö through integrating
Malmö Strumpfabrik AB in the present urban fabric. Using a corresponding and prestigious
site of a female dominated industrial workplace enables an envisaging of how Malmö
can materialise this significant history of its textile legacy.
The autoethnographic method and the framework of critical normativity open an array
of potentials for understanding how the vernacular landscape manifests in the lives of the
inhabitants. Further research into how critical normativity can be utilised in envisaging the
heterogenic urban landscape of Malmö is necessary, both from a historical and contemporary
perspective.