Architecture and Retrenchment

Shortlisted for the Architects Sweden Critic's Award 2023

Architecture and Retrenchment explores the ‘neoliberal turn’ in architecture, through the rise and fall of the Swedish welfare state.

There are few better case studies of architecture’s role in the retrenchment and dismantling of the welfare state than Sweden, the birthplace of the world-famous “Swedish Model” and now home to Europe's fastest-growing inequality. Through eight in-depth architectural case studies, Helena Mattsson analyzes how neoliberalism has created conditions for a new built environment which was once closely integral to the welfare system, examining how new architectural strategies and techniques were developed in order to protect the agency of architecture in a newly re-organised society, and revealing the role of architecture in creating new types of segregation, discrimination, and social stratification.

With close feminist analysis running throughout – and drawing from oral histories, witness seminars, and participatory workshops – Architecture and Retrenchment provides an original interpretation of how architecture, space, aesthetics, and politics converged at the end of the twentieth century.