Stadsomvandling i Göteborg - En fallstudie av Västlänkens motiv & drivkrafter

Abstract

This report examines underlying motives and forces of the West-Link project in Gothenburg Sweden, understood as a case of contemporary politically governed urban transformation. It analyzes and compares similarities and differences of contemporary international patterns of urban transformations as well as the continuity or discontinuity in relation to previous local transformations. The report also maps and analyzes different networks that resist the project and their overarching critique, which in turn is compared with contemporary international critique of urban transformation. The case of the West-Link is studied from a critical discourse perspective inspired by a Foucauldian approach of analyzing dispositives or “apparatus”. Meaning, how motives and forces of the West-Link project is part of historical and on-going heterogonous discourse-network-complexes that produces reality and becomes part of its materialization. The report draws upon previous research on the contemporary governing ideology of neoliberalism and advance liberal urban governance, as well as theoretical concepts such as “ribbon-development”, “place politics”, “gentrification”, and overarching critique of urban planners’ concept “sustainability” analyzed as an “empty master signifier” masking neoliberal agendas in the signifying order of text. The main result of the report is that the West-Link can be understood as a dispositive or “apparatus” that binds all the above historical and on-going heterogonous discourse-network-complexes together. In other words, the result shows that the West-Link is part of the overall global discourse of neoliberal urbanism and the implementing of advanced liberal urban governance in the context of Gothenburg