Diasporic Welfare Landscapes
Transformative Histories of the Million Program
Time: Fri 2025-09-12 13.00
Location: F3 (Flodis), Lindstedtsvägen 26 & 28, Stockholm
Language: English
Subject area: Architecture, History and Theory of Architecture
Doctoral student: Chero Eliassi , Arkitektur, kultur och miljö, chero@kth.se
Opponent: Professor Sonja Dümpelmann, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
Supervisor: Associate Professor Jennifer Mack, Arkitektur; Professor Katja Grillner, Arkitektur
QC 20250818
Abstract
When the national mass housing project known as “the Million Program” was constructed in Swedish cities between 1965 and 1974, its outdoor environments typically remained incomplete. Politicians prescribed national guidelines and regulations that shaped the visions of planners, architects, and landscape architects, rationalizing and standardizing outdoor spaces. These landscapes were soon stigmatized and questioned by media, critics, government officials, and some residents, and, as result, subjected to repeated renovations and transformations. This dissertation investigates such changes and the production of spatial cultures in multi-family housing areas of the Million Program in Holma, Norrliden, and Järvafältet, from the period of their construction to the present day.
Employing ethnographic and landscape research methods, and investigating a series of case studies, Disaporic Welfare Landscapes explores spatial practices, transnationalism, diasporic cultures, and the ways in which people understand their rights to Swedish landscapes of housing. In addition, I engage with the concept of “welfare landscapes,” a term which describes how outdoor environments encapsulated the politics of the high welfare state to bring together social welfare and individual well-being through design. I offer a new take on this concept through my notion of “diasporic welfare landscapes,” highlighting migrants’ interventions. Furthermore, I analyze how these landscapes raise questions of materiality, belonging, ecology, and health, and how various municipal planning and regulatory processes function with (or without) resident engagement. The study relies on feminist and architectural theory as well as methods and approaches from cultural and social anthropology.
How have planners, designers, and residents engaged with plants, materials, objects, and politics to transform the landscapes of the Million Program from the 1970s to the present? And, how can marginalized postwar environments, spaces, and practices be recognized as part of Swedish cultural heritage? By analyzing social, spatial, ecological, cultural, and material narratives addressing these landscapes, this research offers new transformative histories of postwar landscapes as Swedish cultural heritage.