The City of Tomorrow? The<em> Bo01 </em>Housing Exhibition in Malmö, Sweden (2001), as a Model of Sustainable Urban Development

The housing exhibition Bo01, also known as the City of Tomorrow, was held in Västra Hamnen in Malmö, Sweden, from May to August 2001. Aiming to be a model for an ecologically sustainable urban development, the exhibition mobilized an unprecedented number of public resources and initiated a series of collaborations between Swedish research and manufacturing industries to design experimental solutions for ‘future’ sustainable dwellings. A completely new district with 800 apartments, a landscape display, and an art exhibition was built for Bo01 within two years. A few days before closing, Bo01 AB, subsidiary of the City of Malmö, filed for bankruptcy. Drawing on the critical approach to sustainability developed by urban political ecology, this paper examines the housing exhibition itself, the ethics suggested by techno-managerial sustainability practices, and the shift towards municipal entrepreneurialism in the late 1990s.