Urban Rage by Mustafa Dikec

Author:Mustafa Dikec
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300214949
Publisher: Yale University Press

Welcome to Modernity: The Million Programme

Between 1965 and 1974, as a response to the housing shortage, the Social Democratic government in Sweden embarked on an affordable housing project called the Million Programme.12 It was an ambitious project, and the adjective is not superfluous: when the government launched this project to build a million new public housing units, the country’s population was under eight million. The programme meant, at the time, that the state would build one dwelling for every three households in Sweden. And it did, in the peripheral areas of cities, using a variety of forms that included mainly three-storey buildings, small detached or semi-detached houses, and larger housing estates.

The Million Programme projects housed mostly the Swedish working class, as well as immigrants and young people. It was a successful initiative, which raised the standard of housing for many families, providing them with more modern accommodation. As Per-Markku Ristilammi put it, moving into these houses was a sign of modernity: ‘you differed from the rest of the society by being ahead of it. . . It was a youthful stage, full of hope for the future.’13 But the image of modernity did not last long. Deterioration came quickly, followed by demographic changes and stigmatization. The peripheral Million Programme suburbs lost their appeal as early as the 1970s, and those who could moved out of these areas. Policies that encouraged single-family housing and the rebuilding of city centres facilitated these departures during the early 1980s. Better-off families left the projects for single-family houses or for renovated city centres, which led to a concentration of the more disadvantaged populations in the peripheral suburbs. In the early 1990s, Million Programme houses were already among the least desirable dwellings. Non-European immigrants and refugees, guided by municipal housing and welfare authorities, started to replace native Swedes, and by the mid-1990s, constituted 65 to 85 per cent of the population of these suburban estates.14 This is a disproportionate concentration given that the foreign-born population in Sweden is about 14 per cent of the total.

These poor suburbs, however, are not dominated by any single ethnic group: one of their distinguishing features is their diversity. Indeed, it is ‘difficult to find neighbourhoods having more than 10 per cent of the population originating in a specific foreign country’. Yet, there are neighbourhoods with concentrations of immigrants from diverse backgrounds, typically from Muslim countries, which is one reason behind their stigmatization. These are often the peripheral housing estates of the Million Programme, and the poorest neighbourhoods are such immigrant-dense areas.15 Part of the reason for this concentration of immigrants in these areas is the existence of social networks, which make them destinations of choice for new arrivals. It is, however, the government’s previous resettlement programme that placed immigrants in such areas, as well as discrimination in the housing market, which then made them destinations for new arrivals.16 Irene Molina, for example, found in a study of Gottsunda, a Million Programme neighbourhood in Uppsala, that most of the immigrants in the area felt that they were not given any choice of residential location.

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