Of the 4,924,792 dwellings that make up Sweden’s housing stock, 51% of these are apartments, of which 58% are rental tenure. Statistiska Central Byrån, “Drygt 4,9 miljoner bostäder i landet,” ➝.
“Housing is capital-intensive. An overriding aim of a solidarity-based housing politics, however, lies in acknowledging that dwellings are not primarily objects for the creation of profit through the placement of capital. This applies regardless of whether the dwelling is owned by the resident or owned by another entity.” Author’s own translation. Cabinet Proposition, Propositionen för riktlinjer för bostadspolitiken m.m, 1974: 150.
We would like to extend our thanks to Justine Liv Olausson for her helpful introduction to the technical workings of blockchain ledger technologies within proptech start-ups in her lecture “commoning and fractionalising of land and property rights on the blockchain” May 8, 2019, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, which provided the impetus for the present discussion.
See, for instance, Andrew Baum, Prop-tech 3.0: The Future of Real Estate (Oxford University, 2017), ➝.
Vincent Lecamus, “PropTech What it is and How to Address the new wave of real-estate start-ups,” Medium, July 11, 2017, ➝.
Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis (London: Picador, 2004), 12.
See our previous work on the obfuscation of housework in relation to real estate imaginaries. Helen Runting and Hélène Frichot “The Illusory Autonomy of the Real Estate Interior” in Sten Gromark, Jennifer Mack, and Roemer van Toorn, eds, Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects (New York and Barcelona: Actar, 2018); Hélène Frichot and Helen Runting, “In Captivity: The Real Estate of Co-Living” in Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson, and Helen Runting eds, Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies (London: Routledge, 2017).
Nancy Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” New Left Review 100 (2016): 99–117, 101.
Elizabeth Grosz, “Histories of a Feminist Future” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 25, no. 4 (2000): 1017–1021.
Joseph Vogl, The Specter of Capital (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 3.
The Swedish Construction Federation, in its most recent report, states that the recent economic boom is now over: after having enjoyed 5 years of consecutive increases, investments in the construction of new housing fell by 2% in 2018, with the construction of tenant-owned apartments falling 30%. Total investment levels in new construction are expected to fall 6% between 2018 and 2020, with a projected loss of 7,000 jobs in the sector in that period. Sveriges byggindustrier, Byggkonjunkturen no. 1, April 3, 2019.
At the time of writing, 94.6% of Swedes aged 21–50 have a Mobile BankID. See: ➝.
Stockholm Housing Agency, “Om oss,” ➝.
The National Board of Housing, Building and Planning, A history of the Swedish system of non-profit municipal housing (Karlskrona: National Board of Housing, Building and Planning, 2008).
Brett Christophers, “A Monstrous Hybrid: The Political Economy of Housing in Early Twenty-first Century Sweden,” New Political Economy 18, no. 6 (2013): 885–911.
The latter was formalized in the 1974 proposition on a solidarity-based housing politics. See: Cabinet Proposition, Propositionen för riktlinjer för bostadspolitiken m.m, 1974: 150. Cited in Boverket, Bostadspolitiken: Svensk politik för boende, planering och byggande under 130 år (Karlskrona: Boverket, 2007), 75.
Helena Mattsson and Sven-Olof Wallenstein, eds., Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State (Black Dog, London: 2010); Daniel Movilla Vega, ed., 99 Years of the Housing Question in Sweden (Studentlitteratur, Lund: 2017).
David Harvey. A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 115.
Vogl, The Specter of Capital.
Christophers, “A Monstrous Hybrid.”
Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012); Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, Lectures at the College de France, 1978-79 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). See also Hélène Frichot and Helen Runting, “The Promise of a Lack: Responding to (Her) Real Estate Career,” Avery Review 8 (May 2015), ➝.
The medium price of a bostadsrätt was 10,870 SEK in 1998, and 54,902 SEK in 2018. See: ➝. For a summary of changes made to the regulatory conditions in Sweden, see for instance: The National Board of Housing, Building and Planning, A history of the Swedish system of non-profit municipal housing (Karlskrona: National Board of Housing, Building and Planning, 2008).
The question of homelessness, inadequate and insecure housing is an issue we do not directly address here. For information on these issues in the Swedish context see Marcus Knutagård, “Homelessness and Housing Exclusion in Sweden,” European Journal of Homelessness 12, no. 2 (2018), 103–119.
These are characters who have come to incrementally populate our discussion of real estate in its relation to architecture. See Frichot and Runting, “The Promise of a Lack.”
Mark Fisher, “Time-Wars: Towards an Alternative for the Neo-Capitalist Era,” Gonzo Circus, January 6, 2018, ➝.
Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World Finitude, Solitude, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995) 93–94.
Fisher, “Time-Wars.”
See Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010).
Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 156.