The Social City : Middle-way approaches to housing and sub-urban golvernmentality in southern Stockholm, 1900-1945

This dissertation deals with the period bridging the era of extreme housing shortages in Stockholm on the eve of industrialisation and the much admired programmes of housing provision that followed after the second world war, when Stockholm district Vällingby became an example for underground railway-serviced ”new towns”. It is argued that important changes were made in the housing and town planning policy in Stockholm in this period that paved the way for the successful ensuing period. Foremost among these changes was the uniquely developed practice of municipal leaseholding with the help of site leasehold rights (Erbbaurecht). The study is informed by recent developments in Foucauldian social research, which go under the heading ’governmentality’. Developments within urban planning are understood as different solutions to the problem of urban order. To a large extent, urban and housing policies changed during the period from direct interventions into the lives of inhabitants connected to a liberal understanding of housing provision, to the building of a disciplinary city, and the conduct of ’governmental’ power, building on increased activity on behalf of the local state to provide housing and the integration and co-operation of large collectives. Municipal leaseholding was a fundamental means for the implementation of this policy. When the new policies were introduced, they were limited to the outer parts of the city and administered by special administrative bodies. This administrative and spatial separation was largely upheld throughout the period, and represented as the parallel building of a ’social’ outer city, while things in the inner ’mercantile’ city proceeded more or less as before. This separation was founded in a radical difference in land holding policy: while sites in the inner city were privatised and sold at market values, land in the outer city was mostly leasehold land, distributed according to administrative – and thus politically decided – priorities. These differences were also understood and acknowledged by the inhabitants. Thorough studies of the local press and the organisational life of the southern parts of the outer city reveals that the local identity was tightly connected with the representations connected to the different land holding systems. Inhabitants in the south-western parts of the city, which in this period was still largely built on private sites, displayed a spatial understanding built on the contradictions between centre and periphery. The inhabitants living on leaseholding sites, however, showed a clear understanding of their position as members of model communities, tightly connected to the policy of the municipal administration. The organisations on leaseholding sites also displayed a deep co-operation with the administration. As the analyses of election results show, the inhabitants also seemed to have felt a greater degree of integration with the society at large, than people living in other parts of the city. The leaseholding system in Stockholm has persisted until today and has been one of the strongest in the world, although the local neo-liberal politicians are currently disposing it off.

An evaluation of the distributions of polychlorinated biphenyls and organic matter in coastal sediments

The objective of this thesis is to improve the understanding of what processes and mechanism affects the distribution of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and organic carbon in coastal sediments. Because of the strong association of hydrophobic organic contaminants (HOCs) such as PCBs with organic matter in the aquatic environment, these two entities are naturally linked. The coastal environment is the most complex and dynamic part of the ocean when it comes to both cycling of organic matter and HOCs. This environment is characterised by the largest fluxes and most diverse sources of both entities. A wide array of methods was used to study these processes throughout this thesis. In the field sites in the Stockholm archipelago of the Baltic proper, bottom sediments and settling particulate matter were retrieved using sediment coring devices and sediment traps from morphometrically and seismically well-characterized locations. In the laboratory, the samples have been analysed for PCBs, stable carbon isotope ratios, carbon-nitrogen atom ratios as well as standard sediment properties. From the fieldwork in the Stockholm Archipelago and the following laboratory work it was concluded that the inner Stockholm archipelago has a low (≈ 4%) trapping efficiency for freshwater-derived organic carbon. The corollary is a large potential for long-range waterborne transport of OC and OC-associated nutrients and hydrophobic organic pollutants from urban Stockholm to more pristine offshore Baltic Sea ecosystems. Theoretical work has been carried out using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and statistical methods on a database of 4214 individual sediment samples, each with reported individual PCB congener concentrations. From this work it was concluded that the continental shelf sediments are key global inventories and ultimate sinks of PCBs. Depending on congener, 10-80% of the cumulative historical emissions to the environment are accounted for in continental shelf sediments. Further it was concluded that the many infamous and highly contaminated surface sediments of urban harbours and estuaries of contaminated rivers cannot be of importance as a secondary source to sustain the concentrations observed in remote sediments. Of the global shelf PCB inventory < 1% are in sediments near population centres while ≥ 90% is in remote areas (> 10 km from any dwellings). The remote sub-basin of the North Atlantic Ocean contains approximately half of the global shelf sediment inventory for most of the PCBs studied.