Abstract
The turn of the 19th century saw the dawn of a welfare revolution across Western Europe, in which great public investments and state interventions were made in what was increasingly considered to be vital public goods. No other Western European country adopted the values and principles of the welfare state model more profoundly than Sweden. In terms of social policy, Stockholm City set the standards of development in Swedish society, where welfare imperatives permeated all corners of cultural, social, and political life – creating what Stockholm's councilmen dubbed a welfare state-Stockholm. Within the welfare metropolis, regional transit integration provided both the necessary infrastructural scaffolding for regional coordination of welfare initiatives, as well as an institutional leverage point for the administrative upscaling of the Swedish service democracy from local to metropolitan level.
Yet, efforts to understand the materialization of the Swedish post-war welfare ideology have focused almost exclusively on modernist housing and neighborhood policies while ignoring public transportation. Rarely has public transportation been explored as a welfare service in and of itself. As a result, transport services remain auxiliary in historical analysis of welfare distribution, the shaping of modern citizenship, as well as mechanisms of (sub)urban in- and exclusion.
This research places public transportation at the heart of the welfare debate. In the backdrop of the infrastructural turn in the social sciences, it focuses on the political decisions and socio-spatial outcomes of the post-war coordination and standardization of modern transit services across Greater Stockholm region. While network integration has typically been considered as an egalitarian and redistributive social policy, the aim of this research is to explore whether or not, and to what degree, transport integration exacerbated regional disparities and contributed to suburban exclusion across Greater Stockholm region.
To do so, this research looks beyond dominant rhetorical goals of egality, solidarity, and universalization that underpinned the politics of the Swedish welfare ideology, and follows the premise that transport policy and planning provides more nuanced answers to the highly moral questions of who was included and who was excluded from life in a modern welfare society.
Researcher(s)
Research team(s)
Project website
Project type(s)