Ståle Holgersen
Biographic Data
| ID | 446243 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ståle Holgersen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ståle |
| FAMILY NAME | Holgersen |
| SIGNATURE | HOLGERSEN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Uppsala University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6421-9381 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 86 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Building beyond profit: The history and potential future of non-profit construction companies
When housing construction slows down due to diminished profit margins while the actual need for housing increases, people might raise the question: is residential construction best left to the capitalist market? What about introducing other ownership structures not dependent on sustained and rising profits? These are the same questions we raise in this paper, which examines Sweden’s long and prominent history of alternative ownership structures i…
Housing Crisis or Immiseration? Revisiting the Housing Question under Urban Capitalism
The phrase “housing crisis” proliferates in media, politics, and scholarship, and has become the go‐to compound noun for depicting the urgency of the manifold social ills associated with widespread, deteriorating housing affordability. Instead of referring to a temporally and spatially bound event, however, the phrase now has become a ubiquitous signifier to encompass a protracted global urban condition. Such framings, both tacit and explicit, ar…
Green national paradox? How the far right turned Sweden from a (reputed) pioneer of climate mitigation to an obstructor
Class, Climate and Cities: Why is 'Sustainability' Most Popular at an Urban Scale
Class is crucial for understanding why sustainability has become so much more popular at the urban than at other scales. The urban scale is where the capitalist class can most easily colour their investments 'green' without confronting the overall power of fossil capital. Urban sustainability has therefore become the limited answer to a question that should really be posed at other geographical scales. In this article I analyse the intersections …
Political ecologies of the far right: Fanning the flames
This volume engages with the alarming convergence of far right thinking and the ecological crisis in contemporary society. Growing out of the first international conference on political ecologies of the far right, the volume gathers crucial insights from authorities in the field as well as promising early career researchers. With cases ranging from ethnographical accounts of fossil fuel populist protest, historical analysis of the evangelical sup…
Dreaming of efficient markets? Residential construction, competition & affordability in the Swedish housing sector
This paper problematises the perception that enhanced competition within the Swedish residential construction sector offers a panacea to rising building costs and deteriorating housing affordability. The paper investigates the relationships between housing production, exchange, and consumption from three perspectives: (i) an historical analysis of the residential construction industry; (ii) elite semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, and …
Lift the class – not the place! On class and urban policies in Oslo
Urban studies are still troubled by Friedrich Engels’ argument from 1872: that the bourgeoisie’s only method to solving housing problems is to shift them elsewhere. Through analysing urban policies in Oslo, Norway, this paper demonstrates that the almost 150-year-old argument is still relevant. This cannot be confronted without a better understanding of class as a complex and constituting process in relation to urban policy. In this paper class w…
How to incorporate theory in (urban) field trips: The built environment as concrete abstraction
Classroom teaching and field trips are both conventional ways of teaching geography in higher education. But where the former can be highly theoretical and abstract, the latter is rather practical, empirical, and concrete. In this paper, I argue there is a need to better incorporate theory into field trips. I seek to explore relations between theory and field trips both theoretically and practically. Theoretically, I draw upon Henri Lefebvre and …
On Spatial Planning and Marxism: Looking Back, Going Forward
The renewed interest in Marxism that occurred in social sciences and humanities after the 2008 economic crisis has not yet found its counterpart in spatial planning. This paper examines what Marxist planning theory and practices could mean in the current conjuncture. It does so through scrutinising (1) the vibrant Marxist discourse in planning that existed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, (2) the recent history (since the 1980s) of planning the…
Searching for “Solutions” to Crisis: A Critique of Urban Austerity and Keynesianism
Based on reflections on how economic crises under capitalism have been typically “solved”, particularly by examining processes of creative destruction and spatial fixes, this paper argues for the need to rethink the duality between austerity, and Keynesian crisis management, given the nature of the current economic crisis. Austerity is a key policy instrument of neoliberalism. Keynesianism is regarded as neoliberalism's antithesis. Conventionally…
Spectacular, realisable and ‘everyday’: Exploring the particularities of sustainable planning in Malmö
‘Sustainability’, often presented through an ecological–economic–social triad, is today one of spatial planning’s absolute key concepts (and key priorities). But it is also a highly contested concept, whose meaning is often considered evasive or vague. In this paper, we try to counterweigh such evasiveness by putting emphasis on the material landscape produced within a project that is frequently depicted as a pinnacle of sustainable planning: the…
David Harvey: Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
Beyond a Liberal Critique of 'Trickle Down: Urban Planning in the City of Malmö
This article scrutinizes the much used, but less examined, concept of 'trickle down' in an urban setting. We make a distinction between the production of and distribution in the city, and argue that trickle down in contemporary urban policy could be regarded as the liberal link between production and distribution. Based on interviews with key figures and document analyses, we look at the transformation of the Swedish city of Malmö from an industr…
Destroy what destroys the planet: Steering creative destruction in the dual crisis
In the contemporary dual crisis, economic crisis policies cannot be dealt with in isolation from the rampant and acute ecological crisis - and vice versa. In this article, we challenge the hegemonic positions in purported attempts to solve the crises so far: in the economic realm, the Keynesian episode of 2008-2009 as well as austerity policies, and with regard to the ecological crisis, ecological modernization and green economy. Instead, we will…
Green Fix” as Crisis Management. Or, in Which World Is Malmö the World's Greenest City
As economic and ecological crises evolve in combination, some policy strategies might aim at killing the two birds with one stone. One recent example can be found in Malmö, Sweden, where crisis management has operated, we propose, as a green fix. The district of Västra hamnen (Western Harbour) is at the centre of the reinvention of the city: once the home of a world‐leading shipyard, it is now a no less prominent neighbourhood of ecological virtu…
AndyMerrifield2014: The New Urban Question. London: Pluto Press
Economic Crisis, (Creative) Destruction, and the Current Urban Condition
This paper investigates the contemporary economic crisis, and explores crisis theories developed by Marx and Marxists alongside discourses surrounding human geography and the urban condition. Two positions currently dominate Marxist crisis theory: realization/overproduction and Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit . Within human geography, however, scholars rarely discuss crisis theory in and of itself, and when they do, they tend to …
Crisis and the Post‐Industrial City: Or is M almö Building Yesterday's City Tomorrow, Again
This paper investigates the dialectics between urban planning, economic crisis and the build environment by looking at how the city of Malmö (Sweden) has responded to two different crises. First, the so‐called industrial crisis was met with more industrial policies that exacerbated the problems and led the city into a severe crisis in the early 1990s. Then Malmö inverted its strategy and embraced the ‘post‐industrial city’. Nowadays, as the 2008 …
Urban Responses to The Economic Crisis: Confirmation of Urban Policies as Crisis Management in M almö
It is common knowledge that crisis also signifies opportunity and opens spaces for change. When responding to the current economic crisis, is urban planning seizing this opportunity? This article investigates the case of the S wedish city of M almö and explores its responses to the crisis by looking dialectically at the crisis, municipal planning policy and real‐estate capital. In this article, the local state and urban planning are regarded as s…
Spatial planning as condensation of social relations: A dialectical approach
Inspired by state theory and in particular Nicos Poulantzas, this article claims that spatial planning should be seen neither as autonomous (subject) nor merely an expression of something else (thing), but rather grasped as a place for condensation of social relations. The notion of dialectics is used in order to grasp relations between planning and other aspects and social relations. From this, we can outline five theses, claiming that planning …
Class, Community and Communicative Planning: Urban Redevelopment at King's Cross, London
This paper presents an argument for considering issues of class in analyses of communicative planning projects. In these projects, class interests tend to be obscured by the contemporary preoccupation with the class‐ambiguous category of “community”. Through a case study of a project of urban redevelopment at King's Cross in London, we conceptualize and map class interests in an urban redevelopment project. Three aspects of the planning process t…
Green Fix” as Crisis Management. Or, in Which World Is Malmö the World's Greenest City
As economic and ecological crises evolve in combination, some policy strategies might aim at killing the two birds with one stone. One recent example can be found in Malmö, Sweden, where crisis management has operated, we propose, as a green fix. The district of Västra hamnen (Western Harbour) is at the centre of the reinvention of the city: once the home of a world‐leading shipyard, it is now a no less prominent neighbourhood of ecological virtu…
On Spatial Planning and Marxism: Looking Back, Going Forward
The renewed interest in Marxism that occurred in social sciences and humanities after the 2008 economic crisis has not yet found its counterpart in spatial planning. This paper examines what Marxist planning theory and practices could mean in the current conjuncture. It does so through scrutinising (1) the vibrant Marxist discourse in planning that existed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, (2) the recent history (since the 1980s) of planning the…
Urban Responses to The Economic Crisis: Confirmation of Urban Policies as Crisis Management in M almö
It is common knowledge that crisis also signifies opportunity and opens spaces for change. When responding to the current economic crisis, is urban planning seizing this opportunity? This article investigates the case of the S wedish city of M almö and explores its responses to the crisis by looking dialectically at the crisis, municipal planning policy and real‐estate capital. In this article, the local state and urban planning are regarded as s…
Beyond a Liberal Critique of 'Trickle Down: Urban Planning in the City of Malmö
This article scrutinizes the much used, but less examined, concept of 'trickle down' in an urban setting. We make a distinction between the production of and distribution in the city, and argue that trickle down in contemporary urban policy could be regarded as the liberal link between production and distribution. Based on interviews with key figures and document analyses, we look at the transformation of the Swedish city of Malmö from an industr…
Spatial planning as condensation of social relations: A dialectical approach
Inspired by state theory and in particular Nicos Poulantzas, this article claims that spatial planning should be seen neither as autonomous (subject) nor merely an expression of something else (thing), but rather grasped as a place for condensation of social relations. The notion of dialectics is used in order to grasp relations between planning and other aspects and social relations. From this, we can outline five theses, claiming that planning …
How to incorporate theory in (urban) field trips: The built environment as concrete abstraction
Classroom teaching and field trips are both conventional ways of teaching geography in higher education. But where the former can be highly theoretical and abstract, the latter is rather practical, empirical, and concrete. In this paper, I argue there is a need to better incorporate theory into field trips. I seek to explore relations between theory and field trips both theoretically and practically. Theoretically, I draw upon Henri Lefebvre and …
Economic Crisis, (Creative) Destruction, and the Current Urban Condition
This paper investigates the contemporary economic crisis, and explores crisis theories developed by Marx and Marxists alongside discourses surrounding human geography and the urban condition. Two positions currently dominate Marxist crisis theory: realization/overproduction and Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit . Within human geography, however, scholars rarely discuss crisis theory in and of itself, and when they do, they tend to …
Class, Community and Communicative Planning: Urban Redevelopment at King's Cross, London
This paper presents an argument for considering issues of class in analyses of communicative planning projects. In these projects, class interests tend to be obscured by the contemporary preoccupation with the class‐ambiguous category of “community”. Through a case study of a project of urban redevelopment at King's Cross in London, we conceptualize and map class interests in an urban redevelopment project. Three aspects of the planning process t…
Green national paradox? How the far right turned Sweden from a (reputed) pioneer of climate mitigation to an obstructor
Class, Climate and Cities: Why is 'Sustainability' Most Popular at an Urban Scale
Class is crucial for understanding why sustainability has become so much more popular at the urban than at other scales. The urban scale is where the capitalist class can most easily colour their investments 'green' without confronting the overall power of fossil capital. Urban sustainability has therefore become the limited answer to a question that should really be posed at other geographical scales. In this article I analyse the intersections …
Dreaming of efficient markets? Residential construction, competition & affordability in the Swedish housing sector
This paper problematises the perception that enhanced competition within the Swedish residential construction sector offers a panacea to rising building costs and deteriorating housing affordability. The paper investigates the relationships between housing production, exchange, and consumption from three perspectives: (i) an historical analysis of the residential construction industry; (ii) elite semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, and …
Spectacular, realisable and ‘everyday’: Exploring the particularities of sustainable planning in Malmö
‘Sustainability’, often presented through an ecological–economic–social triad, is today one of spatial planning’s absolute key concepts (and key priorities). But it is also a highly contested concept, whose meaning is often considered evasive or vague. In this paper, we try to counterweigh such evasiveness by putting emphasis on the material landscape produced within a project that is frequently depicted as a pinnacle of sustainable planning: the…
Destroy what destroys the planet: Steering creative destruction in the dual crisis
In the contemporary dual crisis, economic crisis policies cannot be dealt with in isolation from the rampant and acute ecological crisis - and vice versa. In this article, we challenge the hegemonic positions in purported attempts to solve the crises so far: in the economic realm, the Keynesian episode of 2008-2009 as well as austerity policies, and with regard to the ecological crisis, ecological modernization and green economy. Instead, we will…
Lift the class – not the place! On class and urban policies in Oslo
Urban studies are still troubled by Friedrich Engels’ argument from 1872: that the bourgeoisie’s only method to solving housing problems is to shift them elsewhere. Through analysing urban policies in Oslo, Norway, this paper demonstrates that the almost 150-year-old argument is still relevant. This cannot be confronted without a better understanding of class as a complex and constituting process in relation to urban policy. In this paper class w…
Searching for “Solutions” to Crisis: A Critique of Urban Austerity and Keynesianism
Based on reflections on how economic crises under capitalism have been typically “solved”, particularly by examining processes of creative destruction and spatial fixes, this paper argues for the need to rethink the duality between austerity, and Keynesian crisis management, given the nature of the current economic crisis. Austerity is a key policy instrument of neoliberalism. Keynesianism is regarded as neoliberalism's antithesis. Conventionally…
Crisis and the Post‐Industrial City: Or is M almö Building Yesterday's City Tomorrow, Again
This paper investigates the dialectics between urban planning, economic crisis and the build environment by looking at how the city of Malmö (Sweden) has responded to two different crises. First, the so‐called industrial crisis was met with more industrial policies that exacerbated the problems and led the city into a severe crisis in the early 1990s. Then Malmö inverted its strategy and embraced the ‘post‐industrial city’. Nowadays, as the 2008 …
Class, Community and Communicative Planning: Urban Redevelopment at King's Cross, London
This paper presents an argument for considering issues of class in analyses of communicative planning projects. In these projects, class interests tend to be obscured by the contemporary preoccupation with the class‐ambiguous category of “community”. Through a case study of a project of urban redevelopment at King's Cross in London, we conceptualize and map class interests in an urban redevelopment project. Three aspects of the planning process t…
Spatial planning as condensation of social relations: A dialectical approach
Inspired by state theory and in particular Nicos Poulantzas, this article claims that spatial planning should be seen neither as autonomous (subject) nor merely an expression of something else (thing), but rather grasped as a place for condensation of social relations. The notion of dialectics is used in order to grasp relations between planning and other aspects and social relations. From this, we can outline five theses, claiming that planning …
Urban Responses to The Economic Crisis: Confirmation of Urban Policies as Crisis Management in M almö
It is common knowledge that crisis also signifies opportunity and opens spaces for change. When responding to the current economic crisis, is urban planning seizing this opportunity? This article investigates the case of the S wedish city of M almö and explores its responses to the crisis by looking dialectically at the crisis, municipal planning policy and real‐estate capital. In this article, the local state and urban planning are regarded as s…
Green Fix” as Crisis Management. Or, in Which World Is Malmö the World's Greenest City
As economic and ecological crises evolve in combination, some policy strategies might aim at killing the two birds with one stone. One recent example can be found in Malmö, Sweden, where crisis management has operated, we propose, as a green fix. The district of Västra hamnen (Western Harbour) is at the centre of the reinvention of the city: once the home of a world‐leading shipyard, it is now a no less prominent neighbourhood of ecological virtu…
AndyMerrifield2014: The New Urban Question. London: Pluto Press
Economic Crisis, (Creative) Destruction, and the Current Urban Condition
This paper investigates the contemporary economic crisis, and explores crisis theories developed by Marx and Marxists alongside discourses surrounding human geography and the urban condition. Two positions currently dominate Marxist crisis theory: realization/overproduction and Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit . Within human geography, however, scholars rarely discuss crisis theory in and of itself, and when they do, they tend to …
Crisis and the Post‐Industrial City: Or is M almö Building Yesterday's City Tomorrow, Again
This paper investigates the dialectics between urban planning, economic crisis and the build environment by looking at how the city of Malmö (Sweden) has responded to two different crises. First, the so‐called industrial crisis was met with more industrial policies that exacerbated the problems and led the city into a severe crisis in the early 1990s. Then Malmö inverted its strategy and embraced the ‘post‐industrial city’. Nowadays, as the 2008 …
Beyond a Liberal Critique of 'Trickle Down: Urban Planning in the City of Malmö
This article scrutinizes the much used, but less examined, concept of 'trickle down' in an urban setting. We make a distinction between the production of and distribution in the city, and argue that trickle down in contemporary urban policy could be regarded as the liberal link between production and distribution. Based on interviews with key figures and document analyses, we look at the transformation of the Swedish city of Malmö from an industr…
Destroy what destroys the planet: Steering creative destruction in the dual crisis
In the contemporary dual crisis, economic crisis policies cannot be dealt with in isolation from the rampant and acute ecological crisis - and vice versa. In this article, we challenge the hegemonic positions in purported attempts to solve the crises so far: in the economic realm, the Keynesian episode of 2008-2009 as well as austerity policies, and with regard to the ecological crisis, ecological modernization and green economy. Instead, we will…
Spectacular, realisable and ‘everyday’: Exploring the particularities of sustainable planning in Malmö
‘Sustainability’, often presented through an ecological–economic–social triad, is today one of spatial planning’s absolute key concepts (and key priorities). But it is also a highly contested concept, whose meaning is often considered evasive or vague. In this paper, we try to counterweigh such evasiveness by putting emphasis on the material landscape produced within a project that is frequently depicted as a pinnacle of sustainable planning: the…
David Harvey: Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
Searching for “Solutions” to Crisis: A Critique of Urban Austerity and Keynesianism
Based on reflections on how economic crises under capitalism have been typically “solved”, particularly by examining processes of creative destruction and spatial fixes, this paper argues for the need to rethink the duality between austerity, and Keynesian crisis management, given the nature of the current economic crisis. Austerity is a key policy instrument of neoliberalism. Keynesianism is regarded as neoliberalism's antithesis. Conventionally…
Lift the class – not the place! On class and urban policies in Oslo
Urban studies are still troubled by Friedrich Engels’ argument from 1872: that the bourgeoisie’s only method to solving housing problems is to shift them elsewhere. Through analysing urban policies in Oslo, Norway, this paper demonstrates that the almost 150-year-old argument is still relevant. This cannot be confronted without a better understanding of class as a complex and constituting process in relation to urban policy. In this paper class w…
How to incorporate theory in (urban) field trips: The built environment as concrete abstraction
Classroom teaching and field trips are both conventional ways of teaching geography in higher education. But where the former can be highly theoretical and abstract, the latter is rather practical, empirical, and concrete. In this paper, I argue there is a need to better incorporate theory into field trips. I seek to explore relations between theory and field trips both theoretically and practically. Theoretically, I draw upon Henri Lefebvre and …
On Spatial Planning and Marxism: Looking Back, Going Forward
The renewed interest in Marxism that occurred in social sciences and humanities after the 2008 economic crisis has not yet found its counterpart in spatial planning. This paper examines what Marxist planning theory and practices could mean in the current conjuncture. It does so through scrutinising (1) the vibrant Marxist discourse in planning that existed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, (2) the recent history (since the 1980s) of planning the…
Dreaming of efficient markets? Residential construction, competition & affordability in the Swedish housing sector
This paper problematises the perception that enhanced competition within the Swedish residential construction sector offers a panacea to rising building costs and deteriorating housing affordability. The paper investigates the relationships between housing production, exchange, and consumption from three perspectives: (i) an historical analysis of the residential construction industry; (ii) elite semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, and …
Political ecologies of the far right: Fanning the flames
This volume engages with the alarming convergence of far right thinking and the ecological crisis in contemporary society. Growing out of the first international conference on political ecologies of the far right, the volume gathers crucial insights from authorities in the field as well as promising early career researchers. With cases ranging from ethnographical accounts of fossil fuel populist protest, historical analysis of the evangelical sup…
Building beyond profit: The history and potential future of non-profit construction companies
When housing construction slows down due to diminished profit margins while the actual need for housing increases, people might raise the question: is residential construction best left to the capitalist market? What about introducing other ownership structures not dependent on sustained and rising profits? These are the same questions we raise in this paper, which examines Sweden’s long and prominent history of alternative ownership structures i…
Housing Crisis or Immiseration? Revisiting the Housing Question under Urban Capitalism
The phrase “housing crisis” proliferates in media, politics, and scholarship, and has become the go‐to compound noun for depicting the urgency of the manifold social ills associated with widespread, deteriorating housing affordability. Instead of referring to a temporally and spatially bound event, however, the phrase now has become a ubiquitous signifier to encompass a protracted global urban condition. Such framings, both tacit and explicit, ar…
Green national paradox? How the far right turned Sweden from a (reputed) pioneer of climate mitigation to an obstructor
Class, Climate and Cities: Why is 'Sustainability' Most Popular at an Urban Scale
Class is crucial for understanding why sustainability has become so much more popular at the urban than at other scales. The urban scale is where the capitalist class can most easily colour their investments 'green' without confronting the overall power of fossil capital. Urban sustainability has therefore become the limited answer to a question that should really be posed at other geographical scales. In this article I analyse the intersections …
Political science (17 works) · Law (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · Economics (10 works) · Political economy (9 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (8 works) · Computer Science (5 works)