Overview

Shortlisted for the Architects Sweden Critic's Award 2023 Architecture and Retrenchment explores the ‘neoliberal turn’ in architecture, through the rise and fall of the Swedish welfare state. There are few better case studies of architecture’s role in the retrenchment and dismantling of the welfare state than Sweden, the birthplace of the world-famous “Swedish Model” and now home to Europe's fastest-growing inequality. Through eight in-depth architectural case studies, Helena Mattsson analyzes how neoliberalism has created conditions for a new built environment which was once closely integral to the welfare system, examining how new architectural strategies and techniques were developed in order to protect the agency of architecture in a newly re-organised society, and revealing the role of architecture in creating new types of segregation, discrimination, and social stratification. With close feminist analysis running throughout – and drawing from oral histories, witness seminars, and participatory workshops – Architecture and Retrenchment provides an original interpretation of how architecture, space, aesthetics, and politics converged at the end of the twentieth century.

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9781350365681

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Reviews

"""With consummate authority, Helena Mattsson tracks architecture's multifaceted, frequently counterintuitive role in the dismantling of Sweden's welfare state. Among so much else, this vivid, theoretically nuanced history of unaccountable power shows how biopolitics stitches architecture and urbanism to political economy, and vice versa."" --Reinhold Martin, Professor of Architecture, Columbia University, USA ""With devastating clarity and attention to how buildings and projects emerge, Helena Mattsson demonstrates that architects don't simply provide the image of the neoliberal built environment, they actively develop the concepts, practices and collaborations that bring it about."" --Katie Lloyd Thomas, Professor of Theory and History of Architecture, Newcastle University, UK ""Helena Mattson's book adds significantly to the growing literature on the 'postmodern and neoliberal turn' in architecture, by highlighting its complex and place-specific character: its focus on neoliberalisation's trajectory in the welfare-state bastion of Sweden provides a welcome corrective to stereotypical 'Anglosphere' narratives."" --Miles Glendinning, Professor of Architectural Conservation, University of Edinburgh, UK"

Author Information

Helena Mattsson is Professor in History and Theory and Head of Department at KTH School of Architecture.

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