Guy Baeten

The Tragedy of the Highway : Empowerment, Disempowerment and the Politics of Sustainability Discourses and Practices

It is argued in this paper that the orthodox sustainable transport vision leads to the further empowerment of technocratic and elitist groups in society while simultaneously contributing to the further disempowerment of those marginalized social groups who were already bearing the burden of the environmental problems resulting from a troubled transport system. Scalar redefinitions of the transport problem play a prominent role in the twin processes of empowerment and disempowerment. Furthermore, the contributions of spatial planning and neo-classical transport economics to the sustainable transport discourses will be critically investigated. The issues of transport inequality and transport poverty should be re-inserted into the dominant transport policy debates and practices.

Normalising Neoliberal Planning: The Case of Malmö, Sweden

This chapter tries to demonstrate how the Urban Development Project of Hyllie in Malmo, Sweden, has normalised neoliberal planning practices that were pioneered in the first UDP in Malmo, 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’ Malmo 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.

Western utopianism/dystopianism and the political mediocrity of critical urban research

This paper seeks to summarise the interplay between utopian and dystopian thinking throughout the twentieth century with a particular focus on the city. The gradually shrinking appeal of the socialist utopia and its replacement with the globalised free–market as a ‘revanchist utopia’ left socialist utopian thinking in a state of disarray towards the end of the previous century. Utopian thinking, both as a literary and political genre has been rendered marginal in contemporary political practices. Urban dystopia, or ‘Stadtschmerz’, is now prevalent in critical Western thinking about city and society. It is concluded that the declining political impact of critical urban research is caused partly by its lack of engagement with crafting imaginative alternative futures for the city. The works by Sennett, Sandercock and the Situationists, among others, may contain elements to reverse the current utopian malaise in urban research.

Politics, Institutions and Regional Restructuring Processes: From Managed Growth to Planned Fragmentation in the Reconversion of Belgium's Last Coal Mining Region

BAETEN G., SWYNGEDOUW E. and ALBRECHTS L. (1999) Politics, institutions and regional restructuring processes: from managed growth to planned fragmentation in the reconversion of Belgiums last coal mining region, Reg. Studies 33 , 247-258. Taking the example of the contested closure of Belgiums last coal mines in the Province of Limburg and the subsequent tumultuous attempts to reconvert the regions economic base, the paper assesses the importance of the political armature in structuring processes of regional change under conditions of prolonged economic stress. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between supra-national (European) programmes and the negotiation of these with regional institutional power configurations, resulting in a new articulation of European and local scales of governance. In the first part, we shall summarize the recent political-economic history of Limburg and indicate the role of hegemonic political apparatuses in shaping development trajectories. In a second part, w...

Neoliberal Planning: Does It Really Exist?

Neoliberalism may be a widely used term in both scientific and popular writings, but there remains much confusion over what its exact contents are – Brenner, Peck, and Theodore (2010a) have called it a ‘rascal’ concept but confirm elsewhere (Brenner, Peck, & Theodore, 2010b) that it remains a ‘keyword for the understanding of regulatory reforms of our time’. Smith (2008) has declared neoliberalism ‘dead but dominant’, and some call for a shift in focus from analysis and critique to the exploration of possible postneoliberalisms (see for example Brand and Sekler (2009) in the theme issue on postneoliberalism in Development Dialogue).

The Europeanization of Brussels and the Urbanization of ‘Europe’ : Hybridizing the City. Empowerment and Disempowerment in the EU District

Regeneration practices in the EU district in Brussels clearly reveal how a mismatch has grown between Brussels’ economic and cultural globalization and its political-institutional parochialization. Brussels’ global mission is being inserted into well-tested local formats of urban governance that have existed throughout the postwar period. Local powerbrokers continue to form remarkable economic growth coalitions that are successfully manoeuvring through obstacles that would prevent them from cashing in on Brussels’ internationalized economy through property development. Any government strategy that would deal with the rapid internationalization of Brussels and the EU district - socially, economically, culturally or politically - is simply absent. Important segments of Brussels’ social fabric are excluded from participation in public political and cultural life. Meanwhile, the success of extreme right-wing parties - which are fiercely contesting the multiculturalization of Brussels - has risen to alarming levels, while different cultural groups in Brussels are de facto generating hybridized cultural expressions which might form the base of a new modus vivendi of community, citizenship, economy and politics.

Inner‐city misery: Real and imagined

The geography of urban deprivation is both real and ‘imagined’. The combination leads to biased and often quite polarized views of cities, their dynamics and their future. Unfortunately the tendency is to depict poverty and deprivation as ugly, as an ‘improper’ part of urban life which should be eradicated and replaced by ‘proper’ middle‐class physical constructions and social structures. But research which avoids the ‘imagining’ shows that this is an unacceptable view of the the inner city where in fact people, despite their poverty, set up a wide array of social, cultural and economic networks of real meaning, which enable them to enter the labour market, to develop mutual support and to participate in cultural activities of all kinds, just like anybody else.

Pressure and violence : Housing renovation and displacement in Sweden

Based on interview material relating to the current wave of housing renovation in Swedish cities, this article will analyse the profit-driven, traumatic and violent displacement in the wake of contemporary large-scale renovation processes of the so-called Million Program housing estates from the 1960s and 1970s. We maintain that the current form of displacement (through renovation) has become a regularized profit strategy, for both public and private housing companies in Sweden. We will pay special attention to Marcuse’s notion of ‘displacement pressure’ which refers not only to actual displacement but also to the anxieties, uncertainties, insecurities and temporalities that arise from possible displacement due to significant rent increases after renovation and from the course of events preceding the actual rent increase. Examples of the many insidious forms in which this pressure manifests itself will be given – examples that illustrate the hypocritical nature of much planning discourse and rhetoric of urban renewal. We illustrate how seemingly unspectacular measures and tactics deployed in the renovation processes have far-reaching consequences for tenants exposed to actual or potential displacement. Displacement and displacement pressure due to significant rent increases (which is profit-driven but justified by invoking the ‘technical necessity’ of renovation) undermines the ‘right to dwell’ and the right to exert a reasonable level of power over one’s basic living conditions, with all the physical and mental benefits that entails – regardless of whether displacement fears materialize in actual displacement or not.

Renewing Urban Renewal in Landskrona, Sweden : Pursuing Displacement through Housing Policies

Abstract The city of Landskrona in the South of Sweden has never fully recovered from a phase of heavy deindustrialization during the 1970s and 1980s. After years of socially inspired plans and projects, the local authorities have now decided to shift gear and tackle problems of criminality, unemployment and social exclusion through a renovation and eviction plan of the inner city. The basic thought behind the plan is to radically alter the social fabric of the inner city through major alterations of the housing market. The Crossroads Centre/East plan proposes that the municipal authorities, together with five real estate companies, form a new company to renovate houses, convert rental apartments to condominiums, demolish and rebuild. One hundred million Swedish kronor are invested in the company – 95 million will come from municipal funds. The proposal in the City Council, led by the Liberal Party, was supported by 49 out of 51 Councillors, including the Social Democrats and the extreme right‐wing Sweden Democrats. The aim is not hidden: welfare recipients should be actively steered away from the city centre and make place for a (imaginary) wealthy middle class. The overall objective of the company is ‘to improve both the physical and socio‐economic status in Landskronas central and eastern parts’. To understand this urban renewal proposal, we would like to present Landskrona as an example of a watershed in Swedish housing politics that forces us to consider: (1) the nature of gentrification processes in Scandinavia – from gentle to brutal; (2) the shift in viewing affordable housing as a problem, rather than a solution; and (3) the possible introduction of “renoviction” in Sweden.

“Because I am who I am and my mother is Scottish”: neoliberal planning and entrepreneurial instincts at Trump International Golf Links Scotland

Focusing on the establishment of the first European Trump Golf development – on the Menie Estate along the Scottish North Sea coast – the paper contends that neoliberal planning, understood as state interventions to allow individual entrepreneurs to realise their visions, reshapes both planning practice and the socio-ecologies governed by planning in problematic ways. Neoliberal mindsets here cause politicians to depart from previously established practices. The paper analyses how governance becomes tied up in questions of entrepreneurial freedom and with beliefs in the capacity of an individual entrepreneur to steer the fate of the region.