Urban Design In, Against, and Beyond Neoliberal Public Space : Everyday Appropriations and the Redesign of Malmö’s Western Harbor Promenade

This chapter argues that how the neoliberal notion of ‘attractive space’ emerged as a planning paradigm in the renewal of the Western Harbor district of Malmö, Sweden, unleashed powerful contradictions. The chapter shows that although the urban design of the area was intended to attract affluent residents from the suburbs to the city, people from less affluent and more ethnically diverse areas of Malmö claimed the newly built and luxurious public spaces through their everyday uses. These actions operated as a form of resistance that undermined the exclusivity that planners sought to imprint on the urban public space and provoked a backlash from both affluent residents and planners who sought to control who was allowed to use this space. However, the local planning administration was ultimately unsuccessful in securing the Western Harbor’s public spaces as a landscape of privilege and was forced to redesign this space to accommodate groups other than affluent suburbanites. The chapter concludes that urban design that seeks to go beyond neoliberal urbanism would benefit from working both within and against neoliberal planning: critically reinterpreting the design features of the neoliberal city by learning from how they are already being reinterpreted through people’s everyday uses.