Ståle Holgersen

“GREEN FIX” AS CRISIS MANAGEMENT. OR, IN WHICH WORLD IS MALMÖ THE WORLD'S GREENEST CITY?

Abstract As economic and ecological crises evolve in combination, some policy strategies might aim at killing the two birds with one stone. One recent example can be found in Malmö, Sweden, where crisis management has operated, we propose, as a green fix. The district of Västra hamnen (Western Harbour) is at the centre of the reinvention of the city: once the home of a world‐leading shipyard, it is now a no less prominent neighbourhood of ecological virtues. Through outlining the history of Malmö in general and the Western Harbour in particular, we identify how the municipality and local capital in concert increasingly used “green” strategies in the urban policies that started as crisis management in the 1990s. Today Malmö is reckoned to be among the worlds greenest cities, and we reflect on the importance of this international recognition for the city. Finally, we develop a critique of the green fix as concealing crucial factors of scale, and hence running the risk of myopia.

Destroy what destroys the planet: Steering creative destruction in the dual crisis

In the contemporary dual crisis, economic crisis policies cannot be dealt with in isolation from the rampant and acute ecological crisis – and vice versa. In this article, we challenge the hegemonic positions in purported attempts to solve the crises so far: in the economic realm, the Keynesian episode of 2008–2009 as well as austerity policies, and with regard to the ecological crisis, ecological modernization and green economy. Instead, we will propose that both the economic and the climate crises can be ‘solved’ through the destruction of a particular kind of capital, that is, fossil capital. Given that capital destruction in general seems to be an essential part of overcoming capitalist crises historically and given the urgent need to demolish large parts of the fossil infrastructure in order to avert climate change, we discuss in this article the possibilities to politically steer the processes of creative destruction so that crises policies benefit the economy and the environment to highest possible extent.