The Landed Municipality : The Underlying Rationales for Swedish Public Landownership and their Implications for Policy

Sammanfattning: This thesis examines the role of public land in housing development in Sweden, focusing on how public authorities perceive their role as landowners, and with what consequences. The thesis is inspired by the work of Doreen Massey and Alejandrina Catalano on different forms of landownership under capitalism, exploring the nature of the relationship between land and landowner when the latter is a public authority.Control of land provides its owner with power over the built environment, as well as the right to capture value increases. In Sweden, large amounts of land are owned by public authorities, in particular municipalities, which have traditionally owned land primarily for two reasons: a) to ensure citizens share in land value increases, thereby generating a more just distribution of resources; and b) to improve control over urban development, thereby delivering access to affordable housing. Even as the Swedish housing system has been substantially transformed since the 1990s, 280 out of 290 municipalities still own land for housing purposes.The study investigates both the historical and the contemporary roles that public land has played for housing development in Swedish cities. The methods used include an interpretive analysis of Swedish Governmental Investigation Reports and interviews with local politicians in charge of public land assets in three Swedish municipalities: Stockholm, Örebro and Uppsala. The study uses the empirical material to disaggregate public landownership under capitalism into three main modalities of ownership underpinned by three different landownership rationales: a moral rationale characterized by an ethic of long-term responsibility; a productive rationale characterized by an orientation towards achievement of practical social goals; and an investment rationale characterized by prioritization of asset value.What emerges from the thesis is a new narrative of how Sweden's public land management has changed over the past century, and what this entails today for local landowning municipalities acting within the contemporary legislative framework. As such, the study contributes to new ways of understanding the role of the public landowners in all their different forms, bringing questions of land back into the centre of urban political-economic research.