Reading the Signs—Distinction-Making Nostalgia in Swedish Postwar Suburbs

Abstract

Undertaken against a background of urban aestheticization processes, this doctoral research explores how Swedish postwar suburbs are imagined and how design is employed through “urban renewal” projects that seek to rebrand urban areas. The research project investigates nostalgia in particular, arguing that its social and political function in this context is to distinguish the studied suburbs from stigmatized and racialized suburbs by rendering them as historically rooted and thus “Swedish.” The central case study is the suburban center of Hökarängen in Stockholm, and the urban renewal project Hållbara Hökarängen, which took place 2011–2015. In addition, the two nearby suburban centers of Bagarmossen and Bandhagen are also studied in relation to the primary case, in order to follow the migration and developments of the concepts and practices embedded in Hållbara Hökarängen. Methodologically, the research proceeds by way of a discourse analysis of: 1) a signage system manual; 2) interviews with representatives of the property ownership and management of the studied suburb centers; and 3) other collected media, documents, and publications that are related to the renewal projects. The discourse analytical study is informed by, tested through, and intertwined with a series of situated artistic/archival interventions framed as “reparative interstices.” A combination of paranoid–reparative (Kosofsky Sedgwick, 2003) operational modes, based on a double situatedness as resident– practitioner, stand as central to this methodology. The study shows the importance attributed to micro-practices and sensory and atmospheric qualities when imagining how public spaces in Swedish suburbs could be redesigned. Building on Bourdieu’s (1984) notion of distinction, the study further describes design strategies as “distinction-making,” (Trinch & Snajdr, 2017) a term employed in order to describe how design establishes narratives of an “authentic” and “progressive” character, with connotations of the (idealized) inner-city. This place identity and narrative is constructed and conveyed, inter alia, through the sense of the ‘50s as a central theme and rhetoric, which can be understood as “restorative nostalgia” (Boym, 2001). The study thus challenges the idea of the renewal project in general, and its claims to authenticity and progressiveness in particular, showing that the design practices employed in the field of urban renewal are not innocent: rather, there are powerful social and political implications and exclusionary mechanisms at work in them that need to be attended to. Furthermore, the study offers a renegotiation of the designer’s role and suggests methods for reparative practices based on a “dig-where-you-stand” positionality (Lindqvist, 2023 [1978]).