Swedish Research Council grants SEK 6.7 million for research on the demolition of homes and neighborhoods

In recent years, politicians at both national and municipal levels in Sweden have proposed demolitions of socioeconomically marginalized neighborhoods as a drastic measure to “break social exclusion” and improve conditions for residents. Despite calls for such measures from across the political spectrum, there is very limited research evaluating their effects.

“In Sweden, there is almost no research on this topic. What we know comes mainly from the Danish so-called ‘Ghetto Plan’ and from American studies of the demolition of marginalized areas in Chicago during the 1990s – contexts where both social conditions and housing policies differ greatly from those in Sweden. We are therefore largely in the dark about the long-term consequences of demolitions for residents and neighborhoods,” says Henrik Andersson, Associate Professor and Researcher in Economics at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research (IBF) and one of the project’s researchers.

The project, Demolitions of housing – Effects on individuals and neighborhoods, brings together economists and economic historians from Uppsala and Lund universities. The researchers will combine historical census data, population registers, aerial photographs, and development plans with modern administrative data. The aim is to understand how people are affected when they are forced to leave their homes, and how the socioeconomic composition of neighborhoods changes when older housing is demolished and replaced by new developments.

“In this project, we aim to understand the short- and long-term effects of housing demolitions in Sweden from the end of the Second World War to the present day. In doing so, we hope to contribute to the political debate with empirical knowledge based on more than seventy years of experience of demolitions in Swedish cities,” says Henrik Andersson.