Catharina Thörn

The Stockholm Uprising in Context: Urban Social Movements in the Rise and Demise of the Swedish Welfare-State City

In May 2013, an urban uprising shook Sweden and took the whole world by surprise, as reports from international news agencies and news channels such as CNN, BBC World, Al-Jazeera and Sky News reported live from poor suburbs in Stockholm, putting in question the image of Sweden as a calm and prosperous society. Following local mobilization demanding the public investigation of a police killing, the uprisings started on the evening of 19 May in the suburb of Husby, with 12,000 inhabitants, in northern Stockholm, where approximately 100 cars were burnt on the first night. The uprising went on for five more nights, spreading to other poor Stockholm suburbs. The magnitude of attention these events received in the media throughout the week of turmoil contributed to their spread to eight smaller cities around Sweden.

Revisiting the urban frontier through the case of New Kvillebäcken, Gothenburg

It has been 20 years since Neil Smith published his classic The New Urban Frontier. In this paper we argue for the continuing relevance of his concepts by analysing the development of a new exclusive residential area (New Kvillebäcken) in the Gustaf Dalén area, a re-purposed industrial site on the edge of the central city of Gothenburg, Sweden. We show how the early millennial plans to create a new city district—Älvstaden (River City)—involved a redrawing of the city map that changed the conditions for this former industrial area from symbolically peripheral (though geographically central) to attractive, but insufficiently exploited, central city land, thus producing a ‘rent gap’. In our reading of Neil Smith’s concept of the urban frontier, we emphasise the close relationship between the frontier mythology that rationalises redevelopment as inevitable through stigmatisation—and the movements of capital—how and where rent gaps are created. The urban frontier creates an analytical space to unravel how the joint forces of the elite (in our case, the close cooperation between private real estate owners and the municipality of Gothenburg) displace long-time inhabitants in urban spaces such as the Gustaf Dalén area to accomplish more financially profitable land use.

Afterword: Spatialized Social Inequalities and Urban Collective Action

What could we learn from the chapters in this book for further developing an analytical framework for understanding the relationship between neoliberal urbanism and various forms of urban collective action? We have moved from the 2005 Paris uprising, involving major, violent confrontations between police and urban youth, who did not couple their actions with the articulation of any shared political demands, to a well-organized and articulated urban social-movement coalition in Poland, with both illegal but non-violent occupation and conventional political pressure in its action repertoire. While these two cases involve very different forms of collective action, we have argued that analytically they share an important similarity: They address, and resist, the effects of globalized neoliberal urbanism. While the various cases presented in this book show that this global process manifests in the form of particular national and local articulations, they also make clear that it always has the profound effect of deepening spatialized social inequalities.

Re-Thinking Urban Social Movements, ‘Riots’ and Uprisings: An Introduction

During the last decade, European cities have been shaken by a wave of urban collective action. In this book, we argue that this wave needs to be understood in connection with the structural context of neoliberal urbanism, and that it can be analysed using the concept of ‘urban social movement’. This means that we go against conventional approaches to some of these collective acts, which researchers and media have labelled ‘riots’. Considering the intensity, spread, duration and social dimensions of the ‘rioting’ that occurred in a number of Europe’s major cities in this period, we prefer to describe them as ‘urban uprisings’, referring to a moment of rapid spread of collective action in an urban context, from district to district and/or city to city, which may or may not include violence, looting and torching. Consider the scale of the urban uprisings in the following brief introduction of the cases dealt with in this book, and the difficulty of making a conventional distinction between (disorganised) ‘riots’ and (organised) movement protest.