Abstract
In May 2013, an urban uprising shook Sweden and took the whole world by surprise, as reports from international news agencies and news channels such as CNN, BBC World, Al-Jazeera and Sky News reported live from poor suburbs in Stockholm, putting in question the image of Sweden as a calm and prosperous society. Following local mobilization demanding the public investigation of a police killing, the uprisings started on the evening of 19 May in the suburb of Husby, with 12,000 inhabitants, in northern Stockholm, where approximately 100 cars were burnt on the first night. The uprising went on for five more nights, spreading to other poor Stockholm suburbs. The magnitude of attention these events received in the media throughout the week of turmoil contributed to their spread to eight smaller cities around Sweden.
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Notes
- 1.
The share of rental apartments has decreased since the 1990s, but is still significant. Today there are 4.5 million apartments in Sweden, which has a population of nine million, of which 69 % were rental apartments in 2007, compared to 75 % in 1990 (Boverket, 2008).
- 2.
The Million Program was an ambitious political housing program realized in 1965–1974. One million apartments were built and the project represented the biggest political venture of both the Social Democratic Party and the Swedish welfare state. Today these apartments in the urban periphery harbor the poor, immigrant part of the Swedish population.
- 3.
Such links were clearly made when Swedish urban movement intellectuals interviewed Henri Lefvebre in 1974 (Lefebvre, Bergman, & Mannheimer, 1974).
- 4.
The situation was different in Stockholm, where the TA joined new social movement activists in the struggle to defend the old working class district Söder (Franzén, 2005).
- 5.
According to the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare (2011), there were 34,000 homeless people in Sweden in May 2011, among them 400 children. The number of homeless has doubled since 2005 and only part of that can be explained by a broadened definition of homelessness.
- 6.
REVA (Rättssäkert och effektivt verkställighetsarbete: Legal and efficient enforcement) refers to a collaboration between the Department of Migration, the Criminal Justice Department and the police, aiming to ensure that the return of persons, who have received a decision of expulsion or been denied a residence permit, is enforced in a way that is both legal and ‘efficient’. It was sponsored by the European Return Fund (ERF), which ran for five years (2008–2013). This ‘collaboration’ is actually a delegation, by which the police are given the task of carrying out the return procedure.
- 7.
The Social Democrats opposed his position, with the argument that the government should add more money to deal with ‘problematic youth’. They argued that cutbacks had made it impossible for municipal authorities to get the violent young men off the streets, i.e., this position also included a framing of the events as an issue of crime prevention (Dagens Nyheter, 21 May 2013).
- 8.
This section is primarily based on preliminary results of Ove Sernhede’s ongoing research project ‘Suburbs and the renaissance for public education: Youths´ self-controlled communities of practices, for learning and social mobilization in poor neighborhoods in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö’.
- 9.
The article was translated and published on libcom.org (http://libcom.org/news/sweden-open-letter-nation-fire-25052013). Members of the Panthers also appeared as ‘spokespersons’ for Megaphone in the above-mentioned ‘Debatt’ on national television. Megaphone declined to participate in the program, referring to the widespread allegations in the media that it had organized the uprising.
- 10.
The TA’s membership has decreased dramatically since the re-regulation of the housing market began in the 1990s; between 1997 and 2011, the number of member households decreased from 620,000 to 528,000 (Hem och Hyra, 21 January 2011, www.hemhyra.se)
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Sernhede, O., Thörn, C., Thörn, H. (2016). The Stockholm Uprising in Context: Urban Social Movements in the Rise and Demise of the Swedish Welfare-State City. In: Mayer, M., Thörn, C., Thörn, H. (eds) Urban Uprisings. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50509-5_5
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