Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

This Master’s thesis is based on a text study of public documents concerning social sustainability and urban development through the densification project of Amiralsstaden in eastern Malmö. Amiralsstaden is the focus because of the municipal ambition of it being a ‘model project’ for socially sustainable urban development. This ambition should be understood as a response to the results of the Commission for a Socially Sustainable Malmoe report (2013) that described a crisis concerning social inequality in the city of Malmö. In this thesis municipal formulations and interpretations of aspects of social sustainability in relation to urban development exemplified by Amiralsstaden are investigated. These conceptions of social sustainability are discussed in relation to theories of neoliberalization of public interest and democracy and in relation to city planning. The methods utilized are text analysis and non-structured observations. The material is then analyzed through critical discourse analysis. We discuss the discursive practices that produce and reproduce the conceptions of social sustainability that constitutes the perceived role of the municipality and the private sector in regards to urban development. We discuss the perceived importance of attractiveness and city-branding through storytelling for ‘successful’ and socially sustainable urban development. Furthermore, we relate these logics the social practices with which they stand in a dialectical relationship. Our analysis shows several problematic aspects of planning for social sustainability conceptualized by Malmö municipality, including risk of gentrification and an economization of the concept of public interest. The formulations and conceptions of social sustainability are mainly articulated through logics of economization and neoliberal aspects of public private partnerships and attractiveness. This is done while formulating goals such as social sustainability and other concepts linked to the welfare state. We find some opposing concepts but overall a lack of interdiscursive challenges to a neoliberal logic thus signalling only a small window for contradictive hegemonic struggle.