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Architecture and Retrenchment

Neoliberalization of the Swedish Model across Aesthetics and Space, 1968–1994

Helena Mattsson (KTH School of Architecture, Stockholm, Sweden)

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English
Bloomsbury Visual Arts
23 February 2023
Scholars in architectural and urban history have, over the last decade, been trying to come to terms with architecture’s ‘neoliberal turn’ and its various impacts - from municipal policy to the artistic imagination. However most scholarship has focussed on generalizations, with very little work to date focussing on specific cases.

Architecture and Retrenchment brings one such case to the fore – investigating the relation between architecture and the Swedish Model of the welfare state.

It tracks the response of architecture to the gradual retrenchment and ultimate dismantling of the Swedish welfare state – which was, in its heyday, world-famous for its integration of architecture and the built environment into the welfare system.

Ultimately, neoliberal economics prevailed, yet this book reveals how new architectural strategies and techniques were developed in order to protect the agency of architecture in the newly reorganised society of the 1980s and 1990s.

Through eight in-depth case-studies, the book situates the often abstract, generalised discourse of neoliberalism and privatisation in specific architectural sites, and provides an original interpretation of how architecture, space, aesthetics, and politics converged at the end of the twentieth century.

By:  
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 234mm,  Width: 156mm, 
ISBN:   9781350148222
ISBN 10:   1350148229
Pages:   272
Publication Date:  
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Preface Introduction: The Next Supermodel Site 1: The Model (1968) Site 2: The Suburb (1968) Theme: Corporatism Site 3: The Collective House (1935–1993) Theme: Human Capital Site 4: The Globe(1982–1989) Theme: The Code Site 5: The Postmodern Housing Area (1981–1987) Theme: Emancipations Site 6: The Renewal (1988–1993) Epilogue: Elephant & Castle References Index

Helena Mattsson is Professor in History and Theory and Head of Department at KTH School of Architecture.

Reviews for Architecture and Retrenchment: Neoliberalization of the Swedish Model across Aesthetics and Space, 1968–1994

With consummate authority, Helena Mattsson tracks architecture’s multifaceted, frequently counterintuitive role in the dismantling of Sweden’s welfare state. Among so much else, this vivid, theoretically nuanced history of unaccountable power shows how biopolitics stitches architecture and urbanism to political economy, and vice versa. * Reinhold Martin, Professor of Architecture, Columbia University, USA * With devastating clarity and attention to how buildings and projects emerge, Helena Mattsson demonstrates that architects don’t simply provide the image of the neoliberal built environment, they actively develop the concepts, practices and collaborations that bring it about. * Katie Lloyd Thomas, Professor of Theory and History of Architecture, Newcastle University, UK * Helena Mattson’s book adds significantly to the growing literature on the ‘postmodern and neoliberal turn’ in architecture, by highlighting its complex and place-specific character: its focus on neoliberalisation’s trajectory in the welfare-state bastion of Sweden provides a welcome corrective to stereotypical ‘Anglosphere’ narratives. * Miles Glendinning, Professor of Architectural Conservation, University of Edinburgh, UK *


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