Welcome to The Promenade City: A Gentri-Fictional Cartography of Stockholm in the Postindustrial Age

Abstract

As we enter the age of cognitive capitalism and immaterial labor, postindustrial cities like Stockholm in Sweden are witnessing the emergence of both a post-regulatory planning policy climate and the concomitant transfer of responsibilities for design regulation and housing provision from the municipality to distributed networks of producer–consumers. As governments effectively withdraw from direct engagement in city-building efforts, new divisions of labor and new forms of control thus become apparent. This essay considers the implications of these shifts by addressing the “gentri-fictions” through which they operate. Deploying notions of chora and “container technologies” as they have been developed through the feminist scholarship of Luce Irigaray and Zoë Sofia, we ultimately advocate a radical rethinking of our relation to the unobtrusive environments that facilitate our (compulsorily productive) experiences of the city and our participation in real-estate games of occupation and exchange.

Keywords::

• gentri-fiction
• post-regulatory
• cognitive architecture
• affect
• planning
• real-estate infrastructure

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ City of Stockholm, Promenadstaden: Översiktsplan för Stockholm [Policy Document, Swedish Version] (Stockholm: City of Stockholm, 2010). Here we translate the Swedish promenad to “promenade” in English, thereby deviating from the official translation of the document title as “The Walkable City.”

² Ibid.

³ Nick Remsen, “Global Street Style Report: Mapping Out the 15 Coolest Neighborhoods in the World,” Vogue, September 5, 2014, accessed January 8, 2015, http://www.vogue.com/slideshow/1,080,625/fifteen-coolest-street-style-neighborhoods/.

⁴ See: City of Stockholm, Vision 2030: Framtidsguiden (Stockholm: City of Stockholm, 2007); City of Stockholm, Promenadstaden: Översiktsplan för Stockholm (Stockholm: City of Stockholm, 2010); and City of Stockholm, Arkitektur Stockholm: Strategier för stadens gestaltning (Stockholm: City of Stockholm, 2014).

⁵ Silke Kapp, “Construction Sites of Utopia,” paper presented at the 11th International AHRA Conference, “Industries of Architecture: Relations, Process, Production,” Newcastle, UK, November 13–15, 2014.

⁶ Manuel Castells, “European Cities, The Informational Society, and the Global Economy,” New Left Review, 204 (1994): 18–32 (19).

⁷ Judy Wajcman, “Technocapitalism Meets Technofeminism: Women and Technology in a Wireless World,” Labor and Industry: Journal of the Social and Economic Relations of Work, 16, no. 3 (2006): 7–20 (14).

⁸ Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81 (161).

⁹ Ann Markusen, “Sticky Places in Slippery Space: A Typology of Industrial Districts,” Economic Geography, 72, no. 3 (1996): 293–313.

¹⁰ Maurizio Lazzarato, “Strategies of the Political Entrepreneur,” trans. Timothy S. Murphy, SubStance, vol. 36, no.1 (2009): 86–97 (89).

¹¹ Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labour,” in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds, Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133–47 (133).

¹² Deborah Hauptman and Warren Neidich, “Architecture and Mind in the Age of Communication and Information,” in Deborah Hauptman and Warren Neidich, Cognitive Architecture. From Biopolitics to Noopolitics. Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication and Information (Rotterdam: 010, 2010), 10–43 (12).

¹³ Ibid., 11.

¹⁴ Keyzer noted this at her presentation for the Stockholm Association of Architects, in association with the prize ceremony for the SA-Prize, at Liljevalchs konsthall, February 15, 2012.

¹⁵ City of Stockholm, “Mina drömmars Stockholm,” last modified June 27, 2013, accessed November 13, 2014, http://www.stockholm.se/Fristaende-webbplatser/Fackforvaltningssajter/Stadsbyggnadskontoret/Arkitektur-Stockholm/Mina-drommars-Stockholm/.

¹⁶ These collaborations are listed on the back cover of the policy document. See City of Stockholm, Arkitektur Stockholm: Strategier för stadens gestaltning (Stockholm: City of Stockholm, 2014).

¹⁷ Remsen, “Global Street Style Report.”

¹⁸ “Söder Pops,” Scanorama (November 2013) (Stockholm: DG Communications AB, 2013).

¹⁹ Hans Lind, “Price Bubbles in Housing Markets: Concept Theory and Indicators,” International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis, 2, no. 1 (2009): 78–90. We also thank Hans Lind for the time he took to talk us through some aspects of real-estate theory and what is a housing bubble; conversation with Hans Lind, Professor of Real Estate Economics in the School of Architecture and the Built Environment, KTH, Stockholm, May 3, 2012. See also Gösta Blücher, “Planning Legislation in Sweden – A History of Power Over Land-Use,” in Planning and Sustainable Development in Sweden, ed. Mats Johan Lundström, Charlotta Fredriksson, and Jacob Witzell (Stockholm: Föreningen för Samhällsplanering [Swedish Society for Town and Country Planning], 2013), 47–58.

²⁰ Hélène Frichot, “Gentri-Fiction and Our (E)States of Reality: On the Exhaustion of the Image of Thought and the Fatigued Image of Architecture,” in The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 113–32.

²¹ B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1999): 97–105. Anna Klingmann, Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

²² B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore, “Welcome to the Experience Economy,” Harvard Business Review (July–August 1998): 100.

²³ The website “Svensk mäklarstatistik” (Swedish Real-Estate Statistics) reports an average per square meter price of SEK73,358 for the period September–November 2014; “Centrala Stockholm,” last updated December 16, 2014, accessed December 25, 2014, http://www.maklarstatistik.se/maeklarstatistik/kommun.aspx?Main=Centrala%20Stockholm&LK=3,003&Months=12&Extra1=8,888&Extra2=8,888&Typ=Boratter&Ant=1,473/.

²⁴ Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October, 59 (1992): 3–7 (5).

²⁵ By governmentality, we refer to Michel Foucault’s conception of a specific “way of governing,” which is enabled by a specific type of rationality in governmental practice – an “art of governing”; Michel Foucault, “10 January 1979,” in The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979 (New York: Picador, 2008), 1–26.

²⁶ Zoë Sofia, “Container Technologies,” Hypatia, 15, no. 2 (2000): 181–200.

²⁷ Martin Heidegger, “The Thing” [1964], in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. and ed. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 161–84.

²⁸ Ibid., 194.

²⁹ Ibid., 184.

³⁰ Marshall McLuhan, “The Invisible Environment,” Perspecta, 11 (1967), 163–67 (164).

³¹ Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962). Mumford’s work is analyzed in detail in Sofia, “Container Technologies.”

³² Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).

³³ Ibid., 127.

³⁴ Ibid., 52.

³⁵ Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” 134.

³⁶ Hauptman and Neidich, Cognitive Architecture, 2010.