For more than a decade, the mobility and mutations of public policies have been at the crosshairs of lively debate in geography (McCann and Ward 2012; Prince 2010; Robinson 2016). The many, often competing, actors involved in this geographical work results in local policies being articulated as strange assemblages of pre-packaged practices, with variations of features recurring across a wide range of places and situations (e.g. Lees and Warwick 2022). One example of such a strange-yet-familiar policy assemblage is the large-scale redevelopment of the industrial estate Sorgenfri in Sweden's third largest city Malmö. While many of the more generic features of this project are recognisable from industrial regeneration and new urbanist discourse (McCann and Ward 2010), they are combined with other geographical imaginaries through grand claims about pushing the politics of planning forward. Sorgenfri has since the early 2000s been pitched as a pioneer of social sustainability in planning, based on an ambition to connect public spaces in disjointed parts of a segregated city. Public “encounters” between “strangers” of this “attractive” new housing area are, planning visions claim, to undo the damage of geographical inequalities. The Sorgenfri project's ambition was, to quote an early planning vision, nothing short of leveraging Malmö's existing “national and international fame” in green urban design to “establish itself as leading in socially and economic sustainable urban development” at a global scale (Malmö stad 2006a).

Tracking the ways that the Sorgenfri redevelopment plans conceptualise urban space, this article suggests that the reworking of familiar planning practices from elsewhere is the least interesting part of the story. The Sorgenfri project's sweeping claims to be a pioneer of social sustainability was not mainly about adapting existing practices. Rather, this redevelopment project became a multi-decade experiment in redefining the theoretical foundations of urban planning itself. In this venture, the Sorgenfri plans clearly echoed arguments from key conceptual debates in geographical and architectural theory. While there are few instances where scholarly sources are directly cited in the hundreds of publicly available planning documents relating to Sorgenfri, this article argues that much of what underpins claims to reimagine the city was inspired by academic scholarship. Unfortunately, the Sorgenfri redevelopment might not be a case providing solid answers to what an urban planning living up to ambitious sustainability claims looks like. However, it is a case well-suited to begin to conceptualise how spatial theory is brought into planning practice alongside the mobility and mutation of existing policies.

This relationship between theory and practice matters because the echoes of geographical scholarship in the plans for Sorgenfri suggest that critical geographers might need to pay more attention to the actual effects of the work that our arguments are made to do in the world. Not only can practical adaptions by oppressive actors divorce theory from the radical political ambitions and “marry” it to new causes, painfully exemplified in Eyal Weizman's (2006) study of Israeli special forces’ rethink of urban warfare through engaging with radical philosopher Gilles Deleuze. In a much more mundane sense, radical geography is most likely to have real-life implications when it is deployed by actors that fundamentally play by other rules than those of academic scholarship. Rather than resign in the face of this situation, geographers might do well to turn our critical gaze towards the ways that radical scholarship is actually being used in practice. It is only by better grasping the ways that theory is put to actual use under conditions far from the choosing of radical geographers that we might, with a sobering sense, identify ways to adapt our writing and teaching to theoretically and strategically intervene in this situation.

Reframing Segregation in a Neoliberal City Divided by Design

Although it has arguably been the Swedish Social Democrats’ most stable urban stronghold historically, Malmö municipality was curiously among the very first adopters of neoliberal urbanism in the Nordics (Baeten 2012; Pries 2020). In the decade after a 1985 social-democratic electoral defeat, the first in almost seven decades, Malmö's city council oscillated between a liberal-populist coalition and the social democrats until an ideologically weakened centre-left again came to dominate local politics in the late 1990s (Holgersen and Baeten 2016). Malmö's municipal social governance and planning bureaucracies were, however, never “rolled back” in a systematic way during these years. Rather, the municipal bureaucracy was instead increasingly put to neoliberal ends. The 1980s neoliberal premise that municipal governance should make the city more “competitive” for the right kind of human capital by “attracting” what was described as “desirable residents” from the region's affluent suburban communities had by the early 2000s formally become the main priority within Malmö's spatial planning strategies (Pries 2020). The first full-scale experiment of Malmö's “social neoliberalism” was the enormous 2001 housing exhibition on the Western Harbour waterfront (Pries 2020), where hundreds of publicly subsidised luxury apartments were built in the town's abandoned docks in a project also successfully marketed as a pioneering experiment in green urbanism (Holgersen and Baeten 2016).

Once plans for a waterfront renewal project in the Western Harbour got moving, planners scaled up their ambitions by designating a second major development project around the commuter train station closest to Copenhagen, the Hyllie station, which opened in 2010 (Baeten 2012). The resources available to municipal planners were with these two projects increasingly used to create spaces that would attract the right kind of residents, and shifted from projects in low-income areas. New housing areas were in this way designed to appeal to well-off suburbanites and mobile creatives, often subsidised with public funds (Pries 2020).

The centrally located Sorgenfri industrial estate was in the mid-2000s designated Malmö's third major redevelopment project. At the very same time, segregation was increasingly posed as the city's main social sustainability challenge, alongside the economic sustainability factors which attracting new, affluent demographics were understood to benchmark. Malmö had, by this point, a long history of poverty, which since the 1990s had become increasingly racialised and discussed in terms of so called “problem areas” (Holgersen and Baeten 2016; see also Foroughanfar 2022). Furthermore, just as planning for Sorgenfri gained momentum, fuel was added to the fire in debates on segregation as a threat to this so-called attractive city, when in the winter of 2008 a full week of riots swept the residential area Rosengård just south-east of the Sorgenfri redevelopment zone, thereby throwing Malmö into the national and international limelight (Dikeç 2019).

So, how were planners to craft a strategic vision for this post-industrial regeneration project to address segregation without also undermining the political consensus around a neoliberal strategy prioritising high-end urban developments as the means to compete for the desirable residents? One strategy entailed using privatisations and place-branding to present Malmö as an investment opportunity and thus attract potential new residents (Gustafsson 2022). Meanwhile, in Sorgenfri, the development process became increasingly shaped by this urgent political priority to signal that planning had solutions to segregation—but without challenging the underlying racialisation of the region's spatial injustices and how neoliberalised planning's priorities of attractive space actively reproduced these conditions.

The first visions for Sorgenfri were published in 2006, followed by a plan programme in 2008. Together these contained elements which were markedly different from the Hyllie and Western Harbour development programmes. For instance, more grimy aesthetics sharply contrasted with the more glitzy architectural renderings of the other renewal projects (Tran and Rydin 2019). However, more important than this post-industrial aesthetic pivot away from internationally recognised brand-name architecture was how Sorgenfri became seen as a strategic site to tie together the increasingly divided city. Where the Western Harbour and Hyllie were high-end housing projects perched at the very edges of the city, the Sorgenfri industrial estate was wedged between the slowly gentrifying eastern parts of the city centre and the large housing areas built in the 1960s and 1970s, like Rosengård. The Western Harbour and Hyllie projects were in many ways about detaching new elite spaces from the rest of the city (see Baeten 2012). In Sorgenfri, though, plans would instead grapple with how segregation could be dealt with through connecting the less affluent eastern residential areas to the inner city.

Confronted with a mounting panic about segregation and facing this kind of site, planners began to experiment with new ways to conceptualise urban space, even as these new propositions had to remain compatible with the strategic planning imperative to create attractive spaces and compete for the human capital of new residents. The underlying hypothesis of the Sorgenfri redevelopment plans, which consist of thousands of pages across dozens of documents, was that the urban landscape could be remoulded by focusing on how city-wide patterns of mobility and encounters could counteract residential segregation and racialised spatial inequalities. Such a claim uncannily echoed several important theoretical debates in academia at the time. Unpacking the selective and strategic manner of such decisions can thus help us conceptually chart the manners in which geographical theory is put to work in the planned production of urban space.

Traces of Spatial Theory Reassembled as Planning Practice

The Sorgenfri redevelopment is, in part, an example of how urban planning is shaped by the active reinterpretation and combination of policy models “from elsewhere” (Robinson 2016). Sorgenfri's early visions were literally illustrated with post-industrial scenes from places like London warehouses mixed with sketches of Malmö's derelict brick factories being repurposed for a new and “creative” audience (Tran and Rydin 2019:21). This borrowing and reworking of other post-industrial planning practices can certainly be explained with models from the last decade's debate on policy mobility (e.g. Lees and Warwick 2022; McCann and Ward 2012; Prince 2010; Robinson 2016). Yet, the crucial role that the Sorgenfri renewal played in conceptually redefining the city as a space of intervention was expressed in a more abstract way that aligns less neatly with the policy mobility debate.

The way in which more conceptual translocal exchange of theories on urban space were put to work in eastern Malmö might perhaps be understood as analogous, and at times even overlapping, with the ways policy mobility is discussed. For instance, Richard Florida-isms were generously used to argue for post-industrial cultural heritage preservation in Sorgenfri (Tran and Rydin 2019), which quite clearly echo McCann and Ward's (2012:46) descriptions of how Florida's commonsensical musings have elevated him to the “most renowned contemporary example” of a “policy actor” globally disseminating a policy package. Indeed, geographical scholarship on policy mobility has increasingly come to emphasise the “complex processes through which fragments of globally mobile urban policies are enacted” by a range of means far more “varied” than the circulation of specific policy practices (Robin and Nkula-Wenz 2021:1268). This makes parts of the conceptual toolbox developed within policy mobility scholarship useful for approaching how also conceptual debates were reworked as policy, in particular those which highlight the active work of “translating” ideas and practices between contexts (Jones et al. 2014). Yet, I suggest, “translating” spatial theory to planning practice faces a distinct set of challenges that the mobility of planning policies does not. As such, this process thus needs to be conceptualised on somewhat different terms.

Extracting a technically viable action plan from a set of abstract theories is not necessarily a straightforward process. Bringing “theories of the social world to the particular project of planning is”, to borrow Ananya Roy's (2011:7) salient turn of phrase, always a “creative enterprise”, requiring active reinterpretations of how concepts are used. One aspect of this process that surely demands creativity is traversing what political theorist Wendy Brown (2001:41) calls the “productive tension” between theory's critical ambition and the need of politics, such as governmental practices like planning, to generate immediately useful knowledge. While critical theories tend to seek deconstructive knowledges that “make meaning slide”, Brown (drawing on Stuart Hall) suggests that practical politics requires “intentionally and strategically” fixing “meaning at the point of the particular truth” in order to make effective “bids for hegemonic representation” (Brown 2001:41; see also Brown 2023:99). So, how is this difficult, yet productive, relationship between theoretical and practical knowledge negotiated as the sliding meanings of social theory are reconfigured in order to fix knowledge-making claims about a particular place's problems, and how it might be “improved” (see Li 2007:7) by redevelopment?

Drawing on how this process played out in the particular case of Sorgenfri, I suggest that planners may draw on geographical theories to craft new policy practices in terms of three distinct operations. First, the provisional truth-claims of theoretical concepts found in sprawling scholarly debates must be turned into clear-cut premises that fix meaning so that a “particular truth” for planners’ direct use can be created. This process is, in some ways, analogous to how policy mobility has been described as hinging on a particular bureaucratic technique that is detached from its local policy assemblage and presented as a “global form” with a “claim to universality” (Prince 2010:173). While both these processes are about detaching a specific argument from its particular situation to make it do conceptual work elsewhere, theoretical arguments tend to already make broad, if not necessarily universalist, claims. The translation of theoretical arguments to something like a “global form” therefore differs from reading a policy practice out of the context of its geographical location. Instead, the context which theory must be detached from is the provisional and precisely limited claims of critical scholarly exchanges.

It is only by detaching claims from the flux of unsettled theoretical arguments “making meaning slide” by fixing “meaning at the point of the particular truth”, to return to Hall and Brown, that conceptual arguments can produce the stable and precise claim useful as policy practice. This is also, one could argue, the reason that the material presented below displays almost no deeper engagement with or citations of any scholarly work outside a few clichéd slogans by starchitects and pop-theorists like Jan Gehl and Richard Florida, despite its many familiar academic tropes. Indeed, explicitly revealing such links to academia's world of complex and provisional knowledge would undermine the planners’ need to ensure stability and universality of their new claims about space. It instead appears to be through the complete focus on a theoretical argument's claim to new knowledge, outside the context of scholarly debate which might highlight this particular argument's omissions and blind spots, that theory may be translated into an epistemologically useful form for planning bureaucracies.

Second, for theoretical concepts to do useful work in planning, theories also appear to be selected strategically to mobilise new concepts that fit with existing policy assemblages. New conceptual claims to know the world thereby introduce new aspects of an issue that planners already struggle with and have defined as a problem demanding solutions. In the case of Sorgenfri, this primarily concerns new ways to conceptualise space that directly latch onto established frames of segregation as a way to avoid dealing directly with racism and inequality. These conceptual fragments of already specialised theoretical debates generate narrow focal points that allow concepts to be used to examine new facets of areas of expert knowledge already established as legitimate concerns for planners. New theoretical concepts thus tend to be brought into the existing policy assemblage in a way that lines up with conventional planning concerns, but also by introducing concepts which bring unexplored issues within this field into view.

Since the exact implication of introducing new issues about established fields cannot be fully known beforehand, crafting policy from theoretical concepts always carries the risk that disruptive contradictions may slip into the planning process, undermining the very premises of planning itself. This risk can be seen as managed in a similar way to how anthropologist Tania Li (2007:7) describes that development bureaucrats diagnose “problems in ways that match the kinds of solution that fall within their repertoire”. A theoretical claim, already placed out of context, is thus re-assembled into planning practice by strategically and selectively pruning the different ways that a concept might define policy “problems” in order to “match” problems with existing kinds of policy “solutions”.

Third, and equally important, it seems that theoretical concepts are strategically selected in order to avoid dealing with certain issues. The very detailed and precise focus of theoretical concepts means that, by necessity, vast swathes of potential concerns remain beyond the field of view of any single concept or combination of concepts. As planning practice is reconfigured around new theoretical concepts, the troublesome concerns that are left in the planners’ blind spots are just as important as the focal points that bring new issues into view. As much as theories are mobilised to bring new, detailed knowledge into planning, they are also deployed to ensure that sensitive issues are beyond the planners’ field of vision. This echoes Tom Slater's (2014) study of how policy shops “actively manufacture ignorance” about areas that might speak to radical responses unpalatable to think tank funders. Theoretical concepts are selected in this manner to reorganise policy, again using a term proposed by planning theorist Ananya Roy (2009:81), to “unmap” troublesome practices, sites, and concerns, leaving them outside planning's narrowly focused gaze.

This conceptual avoidance of the potentially disruptive might, again, be understood with reference to Li's (2007:7) model of development bureaucracies, which notes that an important facet of technical expertise is to ensure that issues are “rendered nonpolitical”. This is done by shifting attention away from questions with potentially far-reaching and troubling implications, in Li's context mostly relating to property. In an urban planning context, expert knowledges’ use of narrow theoretical focal points and vast blind spots instead tends to ensure that no knowledge that troubles the political premises of the planners can emerge in the process (see Zalar and Pries 2022). In the Sorgenfri case, the conceptual blind spots of new theoretical claims selectively placed out of context have allowed concerns about segregation to be expressed in a new way that is disconnected from both the inequalities unleashed and privileges protected by Malmö's neoliberal urbanism and its strategies for attracting new residents.

Tracking how theory was put to work in planning practice through Sorgenfri's grand claims to address segregation in completely new ways, this article methodologically focuses on primary sources produced in the planning process. The article is part of a transdisciplinary project on urban planning where a range of methods, including interviews, stake-holder workshops, field observations, and photographic analysis, have been used. This particular case study builds entirely on archival material. Conversations with planners involved yielded a strange disjunction between the memories of events a decade or more earlier and the ample evidence provided by thousands of pages of primary sources found in municipal planning archives. This reordering of memory to fit present demands is a typical example of what historian Alessandro Portelli, in his landmark essay on doing the oral history of Italian partisans, called uchronic memory. To Portelli (1988:46–50), the uchronic recollections of invented “nowhen events” are not necessarily something scholars should scold, because they might contain “refusal of the existing order”. However, since this article charts what geographical theory was at work in an earlier moment's crafting of new planning practices, rather than how this work is remembered, it relies on archival studies of primary sources. The omissions in this primary material, in particular a lack of citations to all but the most famous scholars drawn on, can to some degree be amended by existing scholarship on planning in Malmö. As this paper will touch on, the local importance of the Copenhagen-based consultancy founded by Jan Gehl (Listerborn 2017; Zalar and Pries 2022) can credibly be seen as the regional entry point for much of geographical theory discussed, with Gehl's latest handbook referencing almost all the works discussed below (Gehl and Svarre 2013).

Hoping to reconstruct the kind of theory at work in the Sorgenfri planners’ ambitious attempt to reconceptualise the urban landscape, this article draws on planning scholar Raphaël Fischler's (1998) reading of Foucault's genealogical method, tracking the multiple origins of planning practice in academic debates. Methodologically inspired by Hodder and Beckingham's (2022) recent argument against relying on digital collections, the article surveys the planning and maintenance records found in Malmö's municipal physical archives about the Sorgenfri area from the mid-1980s until the main planning decisions were made in the late 2010s. These sources include both formal Area Plans and more informal Area Strategies as well as their surrounding debate in relevant municipal councils. In addition to this material, that with a few exceptions tends to be rather technical, the study also draws on formal city-wide Comprehensive Plans and relevant cross-department strategic memoranda from the decade surrounding 2010, which is when the most intense exchange of ideas shaping plans for the area took place. Each of the core theoretical arguments that figure in this primary material are then placed alongside examples of the theoretical scholarship outlining similar arguments in order to point to the resemblances and potential relationship between spatial theory and planning practice that this article focuses on.

Public Space as a Site of Everyday Encounters?

In 2004, Malmö's Urban Planning Department published a strategy memorandum titled “The Eastern Inner City” which highlighted the role of the spaces between the gentrifying inner city areas and a ring of large housing estates on the city's eastern and southern peripheries, where a large part of the region's poorest residents lived. Spatial planning could, the memo argued, intervene in this “zone between the eastern and western Malmö being developed to make possible different kinds of encounters” in order to “contribute to integration” between “people which normally do no socialise” allowing them to “see each other in public space” (Malmö stad 2004:10).

A key element to this framing of “encounters” in public space as a planning problem was developed in more detail in another memo in the same series of planning strategies, simply called “Encounters in the City”. This memo argued that residential “segregation is perhaps not the main problem” (Malmö stad 2006b). The actual issue that planning should fix was, the municipality suggested, that people were “not crossing boundaries to encounter [other people] in public space” (Malmö stad 2006b:6). In this way, rather than challenge the increasingly planned fragmentation of the city into rich and poor enclaves, planning could instead focus on designing public spaces that might generate “everyday life encounters with the other [and] might contribute to a more robust understanding of other people”, the memo concluded (Malmö stad 2006b:7).

It was in this context that the vision for Sorgenfri's renewal began to take shape. The memo on “The Eastern Inner City” defined four main pathways which might link Malmö's eastern housing estates with the city centre's outskirts. Of these, the large Sorgenfri industrial estate, with its derelict factories and warehouses, alone had the potential for a major planning intervention to fundamentally remake the form of public space and create entirely new geographies of “everyday life encounters” (Malmö stad 2004:16). The first local Area Strategy (Planprogram) for Sorgenfri's redevelopment (Malmö stad 2008b) continued along these lines. None of the documents framing urban renewal in eastern Malmö as a tool to address segregation were explicit about the academic pedigree of such retheorising of public space as a site for encounters. Yet, there are clearly echoes in these documents of arguments in critical urban geography on encounters as an everyday practice of urban conviviality. One tell-tale sign is how the “Encounters in the City” memo refers to encounters as something that happens with “the other” (Malmö stad 2006b) in unmistakable academic jargon. Others include the use of academic terms such as “boundaries” and “everyday life” which otherwise almost never appeared in Swedish planning discourse around this time.

The idea that urban public space is associated with encounters between strangers goes back centuries, although the first modern iterations of this idea were often concerned with the loss of tight-knit rural communities (e.g. Vernon 2014). Representations of encounters in public space have since tended to shift to a more positive framing, undergirding the idea of planning for creating encounters in the way that came to the fore in early 2000s Malmö. Today, this shift is most closely associated with the critique of postwar planning of the late 1960s, but was certainly well underway with the interwar architectural avantgarde's visions of new kinds of public spaces in housing areas as sites for sociability as well as architects’ fascination with the idea of “habitat” as a social space (Cupers 2020). Indeed, even Jane Jacobs (1961) prefaces her celebrated arguments about the “sidewalk ballet” as a site of public sociability in Death and Life by turning to one of the most important theoreticians of postwar planning, Lewis Mumford, arguing that cities should “encourage and incite” as many “meetings” and “encounters” as possible. Similar approaches were developed in the same period, for instance by Henri Lefebvre, who in his critique of everyday urban life attempted to sketch the “rhythm-analysis” of the interactions of Parisian public life (Lefebvre 2004). Also, around the same time, Richard Sennett (1970:154) emphasised the importance of face-to-face relations outside the home for coming to terms with difference as a mode of “communal confrontation of the diverse elements that necessitate the exploration of ‘otherness’”.

Since becoming a staple of 1960s urban critique, this attention to encounters in public space has entrenched itself as an important theme in geographic theory, particularly in works exploring how people in cities go about “living with diversity” (Amin 2002). Besides Ash Amin's work, the most explicit writing to channel this line of thinking in the early 2000s was feminist geographer Sophie Watson's (2006) book City Publics, celebrating “the delights of the encounter”. Published around the same time that the first visions of the Sorgenfri project were being drawn up, Watson (2006:7–8) builds on a series of earlier interventions through her arguments that the “public spaces we inhabit with strangers” enable “thoroughly situated” practices of “rubbing along”. Watson's notion of “rubbing along” was perhaps more thorough in its engagement with segregation and diversity than earlier versions of this argument, but it was explicitly situated within a canon including both Lefebvre's and Sennett's work on everyday encounters (Watson 2006:8, 14–15).

While Malmö's planners did not cite texts within this canon, the primary sources generated by the planning process are explicit about the need to experiment with spatial interventions to create geographies of everyday encounters as new mode of thinking about how planning could remake the urban landscape (e.g. Malmö stad 2006a:18). With segregation emerging as an increasingly urgent social problem for planning to address, a focus on encounters allowed planning to present the idea of making public spaces more prone to spontaneous meetings as a novel solution to this issue, isolating segregation from its context of growing regional inequalities. To make the theoretical work on encounters useful as models of planning practice it was divorced from the context of a broader scholarly debate, where the plausibility of everyday encounters as a basis for crafting cosmopolitan and diverse everyday relations was facing increasing critique at that time (e.g. Valentine 2008; see also Listerborn 2017). This made it possible to translate messy academic debates on encounters in public space to an unambiguous policy outcome, with the design of public space providing the unambiguous means for planners to achieve more encounters.

More important than presenting a seemingly new kind of solution to the increasingly pressing planning problem of “segregation” was the ways that the selective use of theories of encounters ensured that a range of politically sensitive issues remained unexamined. The publicly planned production of new segregated enclaves designed to attract affluent residents to the city, a premise at the core of Malmö's neoliberal planning paradigm, was insulated by this focus on encounters used to construct “segregation” as a planning problem (Pries 2020). Thus, this turn to encounters ensured that privileged groups actively withdrawing from ethnic and racial diversity in Malmö remained an issue completely outside the scope of planning despite being so closely related to the geography of encounters. How space can be used to shield the privileged from populations they fear or resent has been highlighted elsewhere, for instance, by Don Mitchell (2017), and before that by Laura Pulido (2000). This blindness to the active role played by the privileged actively seeking isolation from diversity is all the more interesting given that planners in other parts of Malmö, at the very same time, were exploiting these preferences to cater to the affluent residents that neoliberal urbanism sought to attract, by designing spaces which shielded new areas from communities with large migrant populations (Baeten 2012). Similarly, the spatial foundations of segregated sociability in other fields where more sustained social interactions are the norm, such as work, school, civic, cultural, and leisure life, which would have required a much more hands-on kind of antiracist analysis and planning interventions also, conveniently, remained outside this attention to how design might shape spontaneous everyday encounters in public space.

Instead of confronting these issues, that were clearly at odds with the planners’ political imperative to make Malmö more attractive for the affluent and well-educated residents, the planners’ focus on fleeting encounters in public space comfortably placed them outside of planning's field of vision, even as it addressed segregation. Different elements of theories about encounters in public space might, in a different context where planning did not have to shield a neoliberal strategy of marshalling public resources to compete for desirable residents by internalising their preferences as the norms of competitiveness, have been assembled as practice to do very different work. In the Sorgenfri project, however, planners were making the most of this theoretical framing of encounters in public space, and its blind spots, for structural dimensions of segregation, just as they were mobilising its focal points to productively introduce new issues to planning practice.

Public Space as Relational Infrastructure of Mobility?

The attention to segregation in Sorgenfri's regeneration strategy was not merely concerned with multiplying the public spaces where encounters might occur. Instead, these redevelopment plans entailed a focus on urban design for public encounters of a specific kind. The plans were to increase encounters connecting people who were “strangers”. The meetings had to include people from more affluent and almost always majority Swedish areas and people from more deprived areas with a substantial share of migrant residents. Encountering the ample difference existing in the areas inhabited by large groups of migrants, with people belonging to dozens of nationalities, languages, and religious communities, tended to be placed outside the scope of this framing (Foroughanfar 2022:219–223). Only encounters that connected people from differently racialised parts of Malmö would lead to the kind of “everyday life meetings with the other” (Malmö stad 2006b:7) understood to counteract residential and work-life segregation. In this way, the Sorgenfri project's planning assemblage theorised public space as both a space of encounters and a site of intracommunal mobility.

Since the first Sorgenfri plans, this idea of connecting difference through urban design supporting mobility has become a mainstream tenet of urban development. Urbanist Ali Madanipour (2014:83), for instance, argues in his often-used planning textbook that “the primary task of urban design is linking the urban fragments together”. At the time that Malmö's planners really began to focus on segregation, one of the most influential theoretical framings of this issue was Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin's (2001) book Splintering Urbanism. These critical geographers suggested that divided cities are not only a question of borders and exclusions ring-fencing “high end” areas, such as central business districts or gated communities detached from unwelcome visitors (Graham and Marvin 2001:375). Rather, just as important, are the infrastructures connecting specific sites, that risk fracturing with “premium” infrastructure that set up networked spaces for the privileged few (Graham and Marvin 2001:15). Drawing on Doreen Massey's relational geography of place, seen not as “areas with boundaries around” but “articulated moments in networks of social relations” (Graham and Marvin 2001:203), Splintering Urbanism warns that infrastructure might come to “bypass” residents rendered “redundant” and thus make the uneven geographies of connection a driver of segregation (Graham and Marvin 2001:171). This combination of obstacles in “urban physical space” materially inscribing “borders” and the “relational disconnection of networked infrastructural space” (Graham and Marvin 2001:216) thus point to two distinct ways in which cities fragment in complex but profound ways.

In framing the Sorgenfri project, planners in Malmö drew on an approach echoing aspects of this relational perspective on mobility found in Splintering Urbanism, in particular by embracing the idea that it was the pedestrian infrastructure bypassing deprived and stigmatised areas that constituted them as “segregated” places. The Sorgenfri renewal's claim that “one of the most important objectives” was to “strengthen integration” was thus entirely based on the premise that the pre-developed area itself was a “barrier between central and eastern Malmö”, where the increasingly racialised Rosengård residential area was located (Malmö stad 2008b:21). In the 2008 Sorgenfri Area Strategy, this strategic ambition was presented as “bridging barriers and linking together the city's neighbourhoods” (Malmö stad 2008a:68). Ideas of redevelopment creating new pedestrian flows from “from the inner city through northern Sorgenfri and to Rosengård” (Malmö stad 2008a:68) foreshadowed how the “priority” to “heal and link, thus creating the precondition for a less segregated Malmö”, became an explicit goal in the city-wide Comprehensive Plan of 2014 (Malmö stad 2014:23). Indeed, architectural scholar Karin Grundström (2019:28) has argued that Malmö underwent a dramatic “shift towards ‘planning for connectivity’” during the 2000s, with the Sorgenfri project as one of the most important areas where this strategic realignment played out.

Comparing two reports published on Rosengård, the “segregated” neighbourhood southeast of Sorgenfri that plans were mainly concerned with connecting to central Malmö, makes clear that the notion of “encounters” shaped what counted as “connectivity”. It does this by emphasising a particular kind of public space designed with pedestrians crossing “borders” to then encounter other residents of the city. A report about Rosengård published in same series of memos as “Encounters in the City” and “The Eastern Inner City” accurately described this residential area as “near the city centre” (Malmö stad 2008a:12). Though the neighbourhood might have distinct spatial barriers in terms of industrial estates, railway lines, or ring roads on all sides, this memo noted that Rosengård was well-connected to the town's centre by a fine-meshed grid of pedestrian walkways and bike paths shielded from car traffic and a much-used system of municipal buses. In this rendering, segregation was clearly not caused by infrastructural bypass (Malmö stad 2008a:12, 22–24).

A report published a year later by consultants Gehl Architects, commissioned by the municipal housing company, agreed that Rosengård might be a “short distance from the centre”, have “good regional connections” and “planned public transportation nodes” (Gehl Architects 2009:14). Yet, the “modernist” typology of the area and its surrounding neighbourhoods created friction for pedestrian mobilities which made the Rosengård area an “island in the city” with “few visitors” (Gehl Architects 2009:6). Only a massive renewal project, completely redeveloping eastern Malmö's very typology by adding more architectural “attractions” and “connections” pushing through surrounding areas, such as Sorgenfri, could bridge this gap in the pedestrian infrastructure and create new geographies of mobility (Gehl Architects 2009:6–14). This argument clearly echoes Graham and Marvin's writings on “premium infrastructure” but, in this case, redeployed to present future public spaces as a premium pedestrian infrastructure without any attention to the regional distribution of infrastructural connections.

In this way, this new conceptualisation of sparsely used parts of the urban environment as barriers to the city's relational geography of pedestrian mobility was by no means thoroughly grounded in a relational analysis of the city's actual patterns of mobilities. It did, however, help to conceptually redefine how segregation might be understood as a planning problem that spatial redesign of public spaces surrounding the segregated areas might fix. Taking the conceptual premise of infrastructural, pedestrian by-pass as a root cause of segregation allowed planners to frame Sorgenfri's renewal as not only building a new residential area or even an area with public spaces designed for encounters, but also as a solution to “segregation” directly connecting two supposedly disconnected parts of the city. The 2008 Area Strategy explicitly described how the redeveloped “linear public space” of Sorgenfri would consist of “a series of public spaces which people move through”, and how this short-circuited the infrastructural by-pass between Malmö's eastern peripheries and the town centre (Malmö stad 2008b:28). This new “link between central and eastern Malmö” (Malmö stad 2008b:8) showed a “great potential” to tie together “the historic centre and Rosengård”, thus enabling encounters that curbed segregation's effects (Malmö stad 2008b:22).

The plans’, albeit indirect, engagement with the conceptual developments in the relational mobilities scholarship thus appears crucially important to reframing segregation as a planning problem compatible with the neoliberal premises of planning in Malmö. This engagement was highly selective and, if possible, even more spurious than the inspiration drawn from the literature on encounters in public space. The notion that public space itself risked becoming a barrier for pedestrian mobility might echo the notion of infrastructural by-pass, but only made use of a relational analysis of space when framing this particular aspect of Malmö's urban landscape. This selective understanding of a relational urban geography ensured that uneven access to high-end transport infrastructures benefitting affluent suburban areas, and a lack of pedestrian walkability between the more affluent neighbourhoods and neighbouring stigmatised areas, continued to be presented as features, not faults, when the area in question was intended to attract desirable residents (e.g. Baeten 2012).

This selective engagement with relational mobility was folded into a planning assemblage that firmly framed racialised peripheries as a problem. Shaped by planners’ new understanding of encounters in public space as a burden to be placed on the inhabitants of segregated areas, the solution was that they had to be made more mobile for their own good. As such, this selective interpretation also helped reframe segregation as a new kind of a planning problem by suggesting that pedestrian “by-pass” could be solved by redevelopment making public space more conducive to the desired kinds of mobility. It was this selective combination of inspiration from two theoretical debates, identifying spaces that would make pedestrian flows to and from these areas more likely and thus encounters between strangers more common, that articulated a novel relational geographic problem of mobility that planning might focus on. Meanwhile, the complex relational geographies allowing other groups to retreat from these encounters in ways that sustained the inequalities of the urban region were shielded from the planners’ critical gaze by this detailed attention to the public spaces surrounding the most stigmatised parts of the city as potential sites of mobility and encounters.

Public Space as a Defensible Boundary Zone?

What made the Sorgenfri industrial estate so strategic in refiguring the role of public space as site for mobility generating the right kind of encounters was its location within the city. Wedged between the inner city and the northern corner of the most stigmatised part of Malmö, Rosengård, the Sorgenfri redevelopment was seen as a place between two more clearly defined areas. To make sense of this geography, planners selectively redeployed concepts from a set of theoretical debates on public space related to the urban landscape's borders and boundaries, which were assembled with the planners’ new understanding of encounters and relational mobilities.

The role of boundaries in urban space is not a new discussion, with Kevin Lynch's (1960) typology of “paths” being a way to cross the “edges” marking “districts” an enduring go-to reference for many planners and architects. These debates have, however, also been transformed by the relational turn in geography. Urban critic Richard Sennett provides a good example of this theoretical trajectory. Sennett (1978:13) shifted from pessimistically dismissing how planners used borders as “hermetic barriers” in the 1970s to more recently emphasising a distinction between “modern” planning practices “sealing the edges of communities” and new modes of “boundary thinking”, paying attention to how design might organise exchanges across the “edge condition” (Sennett and Sendra 2020:30). In this more optimistic reading, “porous walls and borders create liminal space” which might be designed strategically to allow “crossing out of one territory and into another” (ibid.). These ideas mirror broader debates on the performative aspects of borders and have since come to assume an important role also in urban studies. Lefebvrian geographer Iain Borden's (2001) argument that the city's boundaries are “not a division of things but a negotiation of flows” captures this injunction to pay closer attention to the relational geography of the designed environment's boundaries in the years leading up to the Sorgenfri project.

Conceptual fragments from relational “boundary thinking”, marking urban borders as sites of potential interaction, permeated the Sorgenfri project since its inception. Already in the 2004 “Eastern Inner City” memo, Sorgenfri was understood as a location of strategic intervention for reorganising the space between the inner city and its Eastern peripheries. It was the kind of site that the 2006 “Encounters in the City” memo described as a space for “crossing boundaries” in order “to encounter” people in the public realm (Malmö stad 2006b:6). These ideas were refined in later plans, seeking to reorganise this cross-boundary linking by paying close attention to the main street running through the development area, Industrigatan. The 100-page Area Strategy made clear that making Sorgenfri into a site for cross-boundary interactions hinged on this street. Inner city Malmö would only be linked with the eastern housing estates if the main “direction of the mobility pathway for bikes and pedestrian traffic” was directed by making the public space “legible along the entire area” and removing anything which was at “risk of being experienced as barrier” for movement through the area along this axis. Everything from the scale of residential blocks, the design of buildings with mandatory shopfronts facing the street, the kinds of paving of side-streets, urban greenery and lamp posts were subsumed to this strategic priority of ensuring movement through the area. This meticulous attention to public space was to remake the boundary, supposedly creating a liminal space of interactions which might counterbalance the residential segregation that Malmö's neoliberal planning was premised on (Malmö stad 2008b:28–33).

This translation of boundary thinking, guiding the redesign of strategic public spaces as mobility corridors stretching across old boundaries, connected seamlessly to notions that more mobility and encounters in public space would be a feasible solution to an increasingly divided city. Yet, this was not the only engagement with boundary thinking found in redevelopment plans. Planners were at the same time devising ways to restrict the potential to move or dwell within these very same public spaces, focusing on boundaries between the public and other forms of open space claimed by residents. These restrictions were not only related to how Industrigatan was envisioned to enable mobility and encounters. They were also imbricated within a neoliberal planning premise to create “attractive spaces” that might help Malmö compete for desirable demographics. Thus, even as Sorgenfri's redesigned public spaces were to connect the racially stigmatised Rosengård estate to the city centre, they also had to become an “accessible and attractive mobility pathway” where the desirable kind of residents would want to live (Malmö stad 2008a:10).

The Sorgenfri boundary zone was thus to have an “attractive design of the urban environment” which would “expand the inner city of Malmö eastwards” (Malmö stad 2008a:10, 28–29). Extending the publicly planned production of “attractive” space, the core idea of Malmö's neoliberal planning strategy for becoming more competitive for human capital, also beyond the waterfront and the city centre, forced notions of public safety to the fore (Malmö stad 2006a:9–10, 2008b:14, 22, 32). If Sorgenfri was to provide both housing for new residents as well as linear public space, generating encounters as it connected the city's most deprived parts to the city centre, the encounters between the residents of the new apartments and people from Rosengård presumably passing through the area had to be managed in a very particular kind of way. To deal with this issue, the planners drew on a second kind of border thinking. Alongside connections between areas, the plans also emphasised how to actively craft uneven access to space that might produce a sense of safety, guaranteeing that the new apartments became attractive to the right kind of residents.

Plainly, but most likely only indirectly, the Area Strategy was inspired by Oscar Newman's 1970s “defensible space” thesis, which sets out how architecture might help residents to territorialise open space in order to keep crime at bay (Newman 1975). Newman's toolkit has had a huge influence in urban design since the 1980s (see Cupers 2020; Lees and Warwick 2022). The 2008 Area Strategy emphasised the need for more detailed redevelopment plans where “borders are distinct” between private and public open space, a key argument from Newman's model for creating defensible spaces, ensuring that public life could not spill into areas claimed by residents. The very first internal planning memo about Sorgenfri from 2006 had been somewhat less strict in its vision of making “borders” between public and private space “distinct”. “Fully private yards” could be supplemented with “hidden” open spaces between residential buildings which should be “sensed” from the “street life”. However, the street should still be the area's “primary” source of “publicness” (Malmö stad 2006a:13). In the Area Strategy two years later the boundaries between private and public had become much more pronounced, in order to make Sorgenfri “safe” and “attractive” for its future residents. The 2008 Area Strategy made clear that “environments inside the blocks are to be given a private and relaxing character”, thus marking a sharp border between the “the private interior of blocks” and “the public life on the street” (Malmö stad 2008b:11), echoing Newman's thesis.

The design of buildings and public spaces was to ensure only a “visual connection” between these two realms of urban life, “creating a sense of safety and participation” as residents could survey the streetscape they shared with people from the eastern side of town (Malmö stad 2008b:11). Spatial design was also to enhance this visual link between business and the street, with the shops lining Industrigatan designed to have “windows and full transparency” allowing gazes of residents and customers to “contribute to the public life of streets and [public] places” and ensure this public space of mobility was “safe and comfortable” (Malmö stad 2008b:11–14). It might be the “presence of other people” that makes “a place safe”, yet this presence was staged not by random encounters but by designing “windows and entrances facing the streets and [public] spaces” to allow residents to monitor public life from inside homes and business (Malmö stad 2008b:22). The result was an increasingly austere idea of public space, and when early ambitions to create at least one new public park in Sorgenfri encountered practical problems these proposals were simply dropped (Jönsson and Baeten forthcoming). In turn, the resulting attention to visual connections combined with a strict private–public distinction between buildings and life on the streets echoed architectural theorist Jan Gehl's mode of boundary thinking, making “interfaces between the street and buildings” a key problem of Malmö's planners at this moment, according to urban geographer Carina Listerborn (2017).

In Norra Sorgenfri, planners’ attempts to translate theoretical work on boundary thinking to planning meant selecting concepts which fitted with existing planning practices that already focused on public space as infrastructures for pedestrian mobility and encounters between “strangers”, as well as the political imperative to make the city attractive. Malmö's planners borrowed remarkably different, one might say contradictory, concepts from this theoretical discussion to do different work. Sorgenfri as an “active” boundary inviting mobility and encounters was thus envisioned as a liminal space of exchange at the scale of the city itself, further cementing the way that segregation was constructed as a planning concern, primarily in terms of the urban design in and around deprived and stigmatised parts of the town. However, a radically different notion of boundaries used to craft new and firmer borders could be found at the scale of the residential area. At this scale the boundary between public and other forms of space was to be made more “distinct” in order to make the new area “safe” and “attractive” and to ensure that “encounters” took place on terms set by the prospective new residents. The streamlining of public space as geographies for moving through, and the sharp distinction to open spaces accessible only to residents, was to ensure that all uses were observable to residents and storeowners and that the people on the move did not find any hospitable public space for lingering inside someone else's territory. Thus, the Sorgenfri plans’ intense engagement with different theories of the boundaries of urban space should be read as a rescaling of the “bordering” done by the very design of public space—an issue that landscape scholar Burcu Yigit Turan (2021:58) argues has until recently avoided the critical scrutiny of urban design research it deserves (see also Persdotter 2019).

Spatial Theory Reassembled in Sorgenfri as Planning Practice…

Sorgenfri's regeneration provides a glimpse into how concepts from spatial theory might be selectively reworked into urban planning practices. This example highlights the strategic deployment of concepts from multiple academic debates to fit the established practices, political assumptions, and the dominant political reason of a particular planning bureaucracy, even as planners grappled with new and urgent issues. Selectively detaching theoretical arguments from their scholarly context ensured that planners were narrowly focused on specific issues, which proved important in several ways. It allowed planners to expand their ways of making sense and addressing established planning concerns—in Sorgenfri the worries around segregation—by strategically introducing new concepts to an established policy assemblage. This selective adoption of conceptual ideas out of the context of scholarly exchanges’ provisional knowledge also allowed planners to make authoritative claims about public space which generated stable, and thus practically useful, descriptions about problems which, in turn, undergirded new kinds of planning solutions. Finally, the precise focus with which these new concerns were drawn into planning created vast out-of-focus areas that kept potentially troublesome aspects of these issues, the ones that might undermine the political reason at the core of the planning machinery, outside planning's field vision and scope of possibility.

In Sorgenfri the translation from spatial theory to planning practice echoed three particular scholarly debates that made the focus of planners extraordinarily narrow, and the area left uninterrogated by this mode of planning larger than one might expect. A focus on encounters allowed planners to propose a detailed analysis of how public space might address segregation, while ensuring that the intersection of structural forces and the production of a segregated city following from Malmö's neoliberal strategy to compete for affluent residents were not included in the framing of this problem. Theories of relational mobilities were selectively deployed to identify friction in the pedestrian infrastructure around deprived areas, rather than to study the complex, uneven geographies of mobility of the region made even more unequal by neoliberal planning, which shielded the structural inequalities of mobility and reinforced the idea that it was residents of stigmatised communities which had to be made more mobile. Finally, incorporating fragments of the theoretical debates on the relational production of boundaries allowed planners to define the openness of space between housing areas as a way to address segregation and reinforce a geography of mobility and encounters, even as this bordering was rescaled to discipline the distinction between public space and closed communal open space reserved for future residents of the “attractive” boundary zone.

That these ideas were repackaged and assembled in this particular manner may largely be explained by the strategic political concerns in Malmö's planning bureaucracy at this moment. Each translation of concepts from social theory to planning practice was selected so that they did not undermine the neoliberal premise of Malmö's planning strategy, that is the primacy of competing for human capital by creating urban space to attract desirable new inhabitants. Planners in other contexts translating the same debates about public encounters, relational mobility, and the boundaries of the city would thus surely have made different selections, interpretations, and combinations when reworking these theoretical debates as planning practice. For instance, the strategic framing of Sorgenfri as a liminal boundary zone would not have led to the same austere design of public space as a geography for passing through had the neoliberal ethos of attractive space for desirable people not been the priority in this reinterpretation of boundary thinking. If Malmö's, at the time significant, antiracist movements had managed to use their demands for a more equal city to shape this bureaucratic translation process, that would also undoubtedly have changed the planning assemblage in fundamental ways (Hansen 2022; Merrill and Pries 2019; Persdotter 2019).

Malmö's Sorgenfri redevelopment also suggests that there are questions worth thinking seriously about relating to the responsibility of scholars in theorising urban space and, perhaps, more importantly, teaching social theory to future planning practitioners. We would do well to ask if, despite the best of intentions, there might not be blind spots in critical theories of public space, which already contain the seeds for the austere approach to urban design which was used in Sorgenfri to reduce the public realm to a site for superficial encounters, and to paper over the socioeconomic and racialised inequalities of actually existing neoliberal cities? We might also discuss whether those that have been engaged in these debates have an obligation to return and “correct” the translation of ideas from their work into planning practice and make arguments about what the appropriate non-scholarly, that is political, logics shaping these translations should be? Or, conversely, is it their duty to merely observe processes playing out from afar and adapt their theoretical arguments in the hope that new ideas will find their way into the policy world? Or does, perhaps, this example of theories so seamlessly translated into neoliberal planning practice speak of the need for retheorising space, and the public spaces of the city in particular, on entirely new terms?