Crowd control and spatial distribution: the case of Swedish student housing

In this article, we use a crowd theoretical perspective to look at student crowds and how they have been managed through various subdivisions of student housing. How has the student cohort been territorialised and divided into entities according to differences in group sizes, gender, family constellations, etc., and how has housing played a role in these social differentiations? Using the history of student housing in Sweden as a case, we show both how crowd management and housing was intimately related already from the start and suggest a way to analyse this relation. Unruly student crowds have been regarded as a problem since the birth of the university, but the framing of the problem has changed over the centuries. In Sweden, after centuries of problems with episodic riots in the student cohort, more regulated forms of student housing started to evolve at the end of the nineteenth century. Here, we investigate the management of student crowds from the early days until the consolidation of large student cities around 1970. Student housing has played an important role for the categorisation and formation of the student cohort and has also proved to be a rich, if specialised, field of experimentation for architects and planners interested in social engineering through housing. Our hope is that that crowd theoretical perspective laid out in this paper can inform and inspire future studies on housing in general and student housing in particular.