Mittuniversitetet

Introduction: This paper focuses on how a (assumed) entrepreneurial shift in urban planning and development has been implemented in a medium-sized city in northern Sweden, and how sustainability-as in sustainable urban development-can be argued to be a second shift in urban planning and development or represents an alternative form of neoliberal governance. Method: To explore how and when urban entrepreneurialism and sustainability are interlinked, as well as when they are not, urban policy documents from 1988, 2007 and 2016 focusing on the development of Sundsvall city center has been examined using thematic content analysis. Results: The result shows that the 1988 document is significantly influenced by social democratic welfare politics, with prioritizing social bonds and the Sundsvall resident being the focus, while the newer documents emphasize visitors, potential residents and architectural design to promote the flow of people, money and goods. In this sustainability is put forward as a mobilizing metaphor, and serves to conceal the potential paradoxes of the priorities of the strategy, which involve the contradictions between economic, environmental and social values. Discussion: Consequently, it is possible to claim that sustainability, as a concept, has acquired a new function: to disguise the less palatable consequences of growth by evoking sustainability as a guarantee of the strategy's quality.

The aim of this article is to engage theoretically with city safety and fear by combining insights from intersectional theories of risk with poststructuralist theories of emotion. We argue that the performative feelings of fear and safety need to be disentangled from hegemonic discourses in order to illuminate who the imagined subjects are that comprise the so-called ‘everyone’ for whom safety agents intend to create safe cities. Our analysis is based on group and individual interviews with a total of 39 informants, including police officers, municipal safety agents, university students, LGBTQ community members, immigrants, wheelchair users, elders and alcohol users. The results show how current norms and risks are linked, and why they must always be understood within the framework of existing power structures.