METROPOLIS INTER CONFERENCE -
International Conference on Divided Cities and Strategies for Undivided Cities,
Göteborg, Sweden, May 25 - 26, 1998

Segregation Dynamics and Urban Policy Issues in Sweden

Professor Roger Andersson
Department of Social and Economic Geography
Uppsala University, Box 1003
751 40 Uppsala
Sweden

Phone: +46 184712544
Mobiltel: +46 70 637 42 58
Fax: +46 18 4717418
Email: Roger.Andersson@kultgeog.uu.se

1. Introduction

"A city", declared Eric Lampard in 1955, "is a concrete manifestation of general social forces, but its identity stems from being a particular accommodation to them," (Lampard 1955, p. 84). All around the world, and not least in Europe, cities try to benefit from these forces and to avoid being destroyed by them. Today, as well as in 1955, these general forces emerge from global socio-economic developments. However, ‘global’ does not only imply city-external impulses but localised intra-city tensions between different social strata, as well. The latter are ‘global’ in the sense that they are universal; found in any city throughout the world, and they are often more significant in shaping the socio-economic fabric of the city than issues discussed within the framework of the "Globalization debate". External impacts may come faster than before due to the Globalization of capital and consumer markets, and due to less friction for international exchange in the wake of institutional and technological changes. However, Globalization, external dependencies and intra-city social conflicts are not new phenomena, although social scientists pay more interest to these processes today than they did ten to fifteen years ago.

The cities of Europe, in many ways being a major source of cultural pride on the continent, not only face difficult and similar problems, such as social and ethnic segregation, unemployment, pollution, crime and de-industrialisation, most of them also suffer from fragmented political spaces, as they often comprise 10-30 municipalities, all with their different social compositions, housing structures and job markets. Urban regional planning does exist in some of the major cities but is seldom connected to a more direct democratic process.

The European Union, being very active in the field of regional policies, does not have an urban agenda. Some countries, such as the Netherlands, carry out a rather comprehensive national urban policy, while others, such as the Scandinavian countries, lack such policies. These differences more or less mirror the unevenness of the European demographic and socio-economic space. Some countries have high population densities, a long urban history and political parties with their prime voting base in the major cities. Other countries, like Sweden, are sparsely populated, have a late and geographically dispersed urbanisation process, and have a leading political party that has sometimes been dominated by anti-metropolitan values.

There are many signs of a growing interest in urban policy issues in Sweden and this has to do with the Globalization process in a double sense. First, several of the leading transnational firms in Sweden have important production plants and offices in the larger cities, and their message is that competition has increased. This, they say, necessitates even better local conditions for production in order to stay in business or to stay in Sweden. Second, immigrants have come to Sweden in large numbers over the last 10-15 years, and although they are experiencing severe integration problems all over the country, the situation is indeed more problematic in the larger cities. Some readers may find it questionable to connect both these phenomena to the Globalization process, but as has been stressed by, for instance, Saskia Sassen, there are many connections between flows of capital and the migration of people (Sassen 1996).

This paper will focus on Sweden and, more specifically, on housing segregation and its connection to urban development, demographic and economic change. This paper draws upon two other papers, one article in Urban Studies (Andersson 1998) and a paper written for a conference on the Undivided City in the Hague (Andersson 1997). The final version of the paper will be different. First, the empirical illustrations will be better integrated into the text and commented on for each city (Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö), and, second, I will add a section on the new urban policy that the government has promised to make public this month.

In the next section, I will discuss the development in Sweden in more general terms with a special emphasis on urban economic and demographic issues. In Section 3, I will present a heuristic model concerning the production of ethnic residential segregation. The section also penetrates different moments of this model and this is intertwined with empirical illustrations from Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö (These illustration are attached in the appendix.). In the fourth section, I will present some tentative ideas that aim at explaining the lack of urban policy in Sweden, while the fifth section deals with the area-based programmes that have been launched by the government to improve living conditions in poor and immigrant-dense neighbourhoods. In the final section, I will raise the issue of whether this strategy should be seen as the starting point for a new national policy domain, namely, a coherent, national urban policy.

2. Urban Economic and Demographic Development in Sweden

In terms of economic growth, Sweden has lagged behind many other western economies in the last 25 years. However, unlike many other countries, unemployment remained at a low level (2 percent) until the beginning of this decade, primarily due to a persistent expansion of public services during the 1970s and 1980s. This, coupled with a low wage spread and a high tax level, made disposable incomes fairly similar in working class and middle-class households, often leading to higher levels of segregation between types of households (single/cohabiting with children) than between blue and white collar workers. Segregation issues were not high up the political agenda.

The three major cities in Sweden have different historical origins and trajectories but they were all industrialised in the late 19th century, and their development in this century shows many similarities. Their productive bases have been somewhat different; Stockholm being the centre of finance, corporate headquarters and State administration; Göteborg with important port functions for Swedish export and import industries and with shipyard and automobile manufacturing workplaces; Malmö with shipyards, food and consumer oriented industries. They all had a substantial immigrant labour population by the late 1960s and they were all hit by restructuring problems in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, although Stockholm less severe then the other two cities.

All three of these cities have a history of socio-economic segregation, in accordance with tenure forms and relative location in the city, and as elsewhere in Sweden, the municipalities have had strong regulating instruments in their hands for shaping the functional geography of the city. Municipally-owned housing companies have been important actors and their stock of rental apartments have shown a great deal of variation in terms of construction date, location and appeal to different population groups.

Furthermore, Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö share the experience of taking full part in the housing expansion scheme in operation between 1965 and 1974 (The Million Programme), leading to a new type of segregation – the concentration of low income households to the urban fringe. The rental part of this cohort of residential units has experienced all kinds of problems, often packed together under the notion of "distressed areas", "disadvantaged areas", or simply "concrete ghettos".

In an ongoing research project, (the Urban Geography of the Service Economy), we have focused on the period 1990 to 1995, being one of the most dramatic periods during this century in terms of job losses. Ten percent of all jobs were lost in a couple of years, and even if the economy is now recovering, it will – according to the government’s rather optimistic forecasts – take more than another five years (2003) to generate a sufficient number of jobs to bring Sweden back to the level of 1990.

Between 1985 and 1995, Sweden received 400 000 immigrants; many war refugees from the former Yugoslavia but also refugees and relatives to earlier immigrants from Eastern Asia and Africa. Despite the existence of a Sweden-wide strategy for immigrant reception and integration, the vast majority of these new cohorts of immigrants is unemployed and a substantial share now reside in immigrant dense neighbourhoods, constructed during the Million Programme period.

Both the economic crises and the influx of new immigrants have affected the three metropolitan regions in similar ways, which is illustrated Figures 1 and 2 below.

By 1993/94, it was more apparent than ever before that existing policies did not provide adequate means for coping with the exclusionary tendencies in the large housing estates in the metropolitan areas. Unemployment reached very high levels and the costs for social assistance exploded as the many new immigrants not only were unable to find work, but were outside the general social security system, as well. The situation can be illustrated by a series of maps showing the socio-economic geography of the Göteborg labour market region. Göteborg, like Stockholm, has a north/south social divide. But unlike Stockholm, Göteborg has a poor north and a rich south, and we find most Million Programme rental areas on the eastern side of the Göta Älv river valley. In some of these areas, (Gunnilse, Hammarkullen, Hjällbo, Bergsjön), it is not uncommon to find employment rates below 30%, immigrant densities well above 50%, and more than 1 out of 4 having to rely upon social assistance.

These facts disturb Swedish politicians in general and, not least, the present government. The Social Democrats still have full employment as a primary goal, and these – by Scandinavian measures – rather extreme levels of labour market exclusion do call for special actions. Two questions, thus, seem to have been guiding their attempt to formulate policies in this field: a) Why are immigrant unemployment rates 5 times higher than the rates for the Swedish-born population (30%/6%)? and b) Why do so many immigrants cluster on the large housing estates? Social science researchers in Sweden have also attempted to address these issues and in the following section I will elaborate on the second one.

3. A Heuristic Model of Ethnic Housing Segregation

Although urban sociologists and geographers have tried to grasp the segregation issue by focusing on the migration of households – using concepts like invasion and succession (Burgess, 1925), filtering out/in (Hoyt, 1939; Firey, 1945), housing chains (White, 1971), gentrification (Williams, 1976) and ‘blow-out’ (Harvey, 1973) – there is a need for the further development of dynamic approaches. When segregation is to be addressed more dynamically we also need to include the long-term socio-cultural effects of the segregated city, not only basic economic and institutional factors and actors. Segregation processes cannot be understood or explained if social effects are left out of the analysis (see for instance Harvey and Chatterjee, 1973; Scott, 1986; Smith, 1989a, 1989b, Friedrichs, 1997).

Patterns of residential segregation are the result of migration, and migration decisions are often taken because people would like to avoid the negative effects of residing in certain areas. Almost every adult person resides in a particular house in a particular area because (s)he has moved there, either voluntary or due to various degrees of force. Understanding migration, primarily intra-urban migration, is thereby a crucial condition for grasping segregation processes. And in order to better understand ethnic housing segregation we need to address the question of why individuals of a certain ethnic origin (for instance, native Swedes) move out from some residential areas and why individuals of some other ethnic origin (a foreign-born category), non-voluntarily or voluntarily move into the same areas.

As people make (or are forced to make) these kinds of decisions they seem to be reacting or responding in what preliminary could be labelled as a push-pull fashion. People having a real option strive for avoiding some experienced or perceived negative effects of residing in a particular area, and they want to benefit from residing in another residential area.

In Figure 7, a simple dynamic model is presented. The segregation process is viewed from the perspective of selective migration. Although the model may be relevant for analysing similar processes in other countries, it has been developed in order to investigate the Swedish case (Andersson and Molina, 1996), and I will discuss it using Swedish examples.

1. The Proto-segregation Phase

It is a fact that all residential areas that have high immigrant concentrations today used to have much smaller concentrations some 10, 20 or 30 years ago. The most discussed Swedish example is Rinkeby, located in north-western Stockholm, where 12 percent were of non-Swedish origin in 1970 whereas approximately 80 percent fall into that category in 1995. In the model, this kind of ethnic-selective migration is called segregation-generating migration. It can be said to start when a neighbourhood reaches a level of immigrants higher than the city average (normally 10-20% in Sweden). The reason the initial phase – we might call it the proto-segregation phase – emerges may vary over time and space. In Sweden, most research evidence points in the direction of two relevant explanations. First, only residential areas having a rather high level of turnover and vacancies are exposed to these processes. Sudden changes in the population composition seem to cause instability and lack of cohesion. With few exceptions, these characteristics are only found in the rental segment of the housing market and especially on the larger estates (see maps in Appendix 1). Second, new refugees as well as other population segments lacking economic and political resources, are actively directed to certain particular residential areas (see below, institutional aspects).

Figure 7. Ethnic residential segregation: A framework for dynamic approaches. Source: Andersson 1998, p. 419.

2. Segregation-generated Migration

As soon as this type of migration starts on some scale there will be both direct and indirect effects on the remaining residents. Some, but probably rather few, will move out because they don’t feel comfortable with the increasing numbers of foreigners in the area. Others, probably a larger number, will move out because of the secondary effects in the day care centres and in the schools, or in other local social institutions (or perhaps simply because the area incurs a bad reputation). As the number of non-native speaking children begins to grow, and some of them perhaps need more attention and support than can be allocated by the authorities to meet their needs, many parents feel uncertain about the quality of school education and of socialisation processes in general. In particular, those families having the economic resources tend to move out in this early process of ethnic selective migration. It should be stressed, however, that ‘the problem’ should not be primarily defined as a problem of ethnicity or a problem of who lives in the area, but rather as a problem of institutional quality. In many cases, teachers do not have the best qualifications or else they have to handle too many pupils or have very limited resources.

This indirect migration – caused by the initial sequence of segregation-generating migration – is called segregation-generated migration. There seems to be thresholds in these processes. Many residential areas have had ‘immigrant densities’ (first generation immigrants) well above the city average without leading to segregation-generated migration on a larger scale. However, it seems like such migration becomes common in areas where the immigrant density approaches or passes 20 percent, more so if these immigrants have a non-European, ‘Third World’ origin. (See Appendix 2 for some examples of the geography of ethnicity in Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö. Generally speaking, geographically dispersed nationalities show a lower degree of labour market exclusion, have higher average incomes, and move up the housing market as incomes increase).

Another threshold may be found at ‘immigrant densities’ around 40-50 percent. In many of these latter areas – which were very few in Sweden only a few years ago – segregation-generated migration has rapidly turned the areas into 'immigrant enclaves', where the remaining Swedish families are very few indeed. Newly arrived immigrants, like other migrants, are young and, in some cases, have more children than Swedish families. It is, therefore, common to find that some classes in schools, and in some cases entire schools, located in such areas, almost totally comprise children of foreign-born parents. It is easy to realise that to learn the Swedish language in such a context raises severe problems, and these problems will, to some extent, exist even for children with Swedish-speaking parents. And, they will probably be even more negatively perceived by the latter.

I would, therefore, argue that segregation-generated migration has a ground in existing socio-material conditions. But, this does not imply that we can overlook the symbolic production that is intertwined with the development of these conditions. The symbolic production takes place both within and outside this particular residential area (Molina 1997, Pred 1997). As the residential area starts getting a ‘doubtful reputation’, a process that often takes place outside the area itself, people within the area will become affected. People with extensive social networks outside the area will probably be more affected than those who have more local, bounded social networks. Unemployed immigrants will probably more often be found within the latter category, while a dual career Swedish-born family would be a candidate for a typical example of the former, and this family will probably also have the option to move.

3. Institutionally-generated Migration

Third, many political decisions constantly affect the dynamics of the housing market and intra-urban migration patterns. It is not possible within the scope of this article to discuss the institutional setting and housing policies in any detail, but a few remarks should be made to point out the importance of these frameworks. (For further details, see, e.g., Dickens et al, 1985; Holm, 1985; Kemeny, 1987).

With only a few exceptions, the 'problem areas' of today were constructed during the Million Programme era, a housing policy programme launched in the mid 1960s in order to find a fast solution for some major spatial and demographic changes that affected Sweden at that time. The demand for housing was enormous and there was money around for a major modernisation of the housing stock. From 1965 to 1974, nearly one million new dwellings were constructed and the quantitative aim of the Million Programme was almost achieved. These were great days for construction companies and for the art of social engineering, but according to many critics, closer to a disaster in terms of architectural values and social development.

Not only were the new areas of a larger scale than had been built before, they were often located on or beyond the existing urban fringe, which made them less attractive for the growing number of elderly people or for other groups not possessing private transportation. Public communications were sometimes not adequate, and the social and commercial centres that were planned often came into existence much too late or, in some cases, not at all. Furthermore, as the programme approached its final years, the demand for new housing started to fall and many of the new residential areas got problems with empty flats. Meanwhile, the State also subsidised the construction of owner occupied housing and both working class and middle-class families had economic motives for buying homes as the mortgage costs could be fully used for a tax reduction.

All in all, the housing policy led to social segregation, and the households in many cities became more than ever before distributed throughout the urban space in accordance to tenure forms and levels of incomes and wealth.

The publicly owned multifamily houses had to be filled if costs were to be kept at a reasonable level. One solution was to allocate these new dwellings to all sorts of newcomers on the local housing market: young families, migrants from the rest of Sweden, labour immigrants, etc. These groups often lacked roots in the particular urban site and they were rather mobile. Those who could afford to move left the area within a year or two. This caused a high turnaround which became a problem in itself. But worst of all: these areas became the housing solution and the last resort for all sorts of people needing social assistance; alcoholics, other sorts of substance abusers, the mentally ill, etc. As these groups were reliant on social benefits and could not pay the rent by themselves, they were allocated to areas where demand was low and empty dwellings were available.

As a consequence, many Million Programme areas got a bad reputation; they became stigmatised. Although some of them have now recovered and could be expected to recover even more (especially in smaller cities), they still seem to function as regulators on the housing market. When demand is low, they immediately face the problem of many vacancies. When demand for housing rises, they are the last areas that become fully occupied.

The Million Programme is but one of many examples of how a political decision and the financial system that backs it up cause great changes in terms of settlement patterns and intra-urban migration flows. Other important components in the institutional framework are the fiscal system, the general welfare schemes, immigration and immigrant policy, (e. g., the ‘Sweden-wide strategy for refugee reception’), just to mention a few but important regulatory mechanisms. Although most attention in the public debate is being paid to the local gatekeepers, for example, civil servants within the public immigrant administration or the housing associations, such gatekeepers are part of a complex set of institutional actors and their room for manoeuvre is decided at political levels (State and local authorities).

In the model, migration decisions influenced by these kind of frameworks and political decisions are called institutionally-generated migration.

4. Network-oriented Migration

Finally we reach the ‘cultural ways of living’- domain. Although network-oriented migration must always be taken into consideration (it is, of course, a general, not an ‘immigrant-specific’, phenomenon) it is my view that the argument that immigrants want to live near their fellow countrymen has been pushed far too far in the Swedish case, (cf. Molina 1997). As has been pointed out above, it is normal in Sweden to find as many as fifty or sometimes even more than one hundred different nationalities in some residential areas. The residents in these areas often share the immigrant experience but not ethnic origins. In some cases, ‘enemies’ from the area of origin live closer together in Sweden than they did before they decided or were forced to emigrate (e.g., people from different parts of the former Yugoslavia and from the Middle East). The segregation pattern that we have to understand is, more than anything else, a growing separation between the Swedish-born population and, in particular, the non-European post-1984 immigrant cohort.

This said, it is without a doubt so that people make migration decisions on the basis of many sources of information. But, the social network is probably one of the most important sources in this respect. It could also be hypothesised that the social/cultural network is of greater importance for many new immigrants than for an ordinary Swedish person, as the latter could rely upon a fond of appropriate local experiences, memories, mental maps and a better knowledge of the institutional system.

4. Urban Policy Issues in Sweden

As I pointed out in the introduction, Sweden does not have a national urban policy. There are at least four reasons for this.

First, the country has a large and sparsely populated area and urbanisation came about late. The geography of the political base of the Social Democrats mirrors, to a high extent, this spatial structure.

Second, the Swedish administrative tradition implies that municipalities have strong power and autonomy. They have the right to tax income and to decide on most local issues. Urban policy has, therefore, been seen as a local, not national, policy domain.

Third, Sweden has pursued a social convergence policy and a general welfare policy, leading to small nominal wage differences, a decreasing gap in disposable incomes and fairly equal access to social services. Fewer social differences normally mean less residential segregation and less social exclusion.

Fourth, an active labour and housing policy have been cornerstones of the Social Democrats' post-war policy. Relatively low unemployment rates, along with strong public control of land ownership, of the exploitation of urban land and construction in general, have resulted in less severe urban problems in Sweden compared with many other countries in Europe – not to mention the U.S. Sweden’s "inner city problems" vanished more or less in the 1960s, when most inner cities were heavily restructured, and the problem of the housing shortage was solved by the Million Programme (1965-75). Unemployment was persistently low until 1991.

The urban panorama of today is, thus, a result not only of the "general social forces" mentioned by Lampard, but to a high degree also of rather powerful state regulation and intervention in the socio-economic field, as well as of the local mediating forces that influence city development in each particular case. Nevertheless, Sweden today faces very much the same basic problems as other cities in the world and policy responses also show similarities. The reasons are partly that the general social forces are powerful and that national policies tend to be less important and/or successful in influencing their outcome now compared with 15-20 years ago. But, there has also been a policy change in Sweden over the last ten years, and clearly in a more liberal direction. The general welfare policy is somewhat less general, wage gaps tend to increase, and the strong public control of urban investment is weaker today than before.

And, as elsewhere, when general policies weaken, selective policy measures increase in importance. In order to combat social exclusionary tendencies – which more frequently emerge in the larger cities – people call for state intervention. By the end of this month, we may witness the first governmental proposition that will be labelled a national urban policy. The focus of this policy will be on an area-based strategy aimed at improving the living conditions on the large-scale housing estates in Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö. In the next section I will briefly summarise the emergence of this strategy.

5. The Emergence of the Area-based Urban Strategy

In early 1995, the Minister in charge of ethnic integration issues, the late Mr. Leif Blomberg, declared that the government intended to put extra money into a special assistance programme for neighbourhood development.

"The aim of these extra contributions is to increase the level of competence and labour market participation rates among residents in immigrant dense areas and to promote good social development and to combat outsiderness. (...) The extra resources should be allocated to specific projects in a limited number of segregated and immigrant dense areas in the big cities. The actions should be based on local initiatives from within the areas and the municipalities themselves. The municipality should have the operative responsibility for the implementation and carrying out of the projects. It is expected that the labour exchange bureau, the social insurance office, the county administration, trade unions and other organisations will be involved in the actions." (Regeringens proposition (Government Proposition) 1994/95:100, bil. 11, p. 161)

Somewhat later the same spring, the guidelines from the Ministry of Labour were a bit more precise:

The directive states that municipalities who wish to apply for extra resources should present a comprehensive and co-ordinated plan of action. This should be based on local initiatives and local needs. Those plans of action that comprise projects characterised by innovative ideas and strategies and that are based on co-operation between many actors will be prioritised. In the first step, resources will be allocated to Stockholm, Göteborg, Malmö and Botkyrka municipalities but other larger municipalities or municipalities within the metropolitan regions having a similar map of problems, could be selected. The state support should be seen as an initial contribution to innovative planning, and the projects may be financed on a 50/50-basis only for a year or two. Later, the municipalities will be responsible for the integration of the projects into their normal budget. (Guidelines, Arbetsmarknadsdepartementet (Ministry of Labour), Feb. 27, 1995, p.1-2)

The list of aims had now been somewhat extended. The guideline document also mentions the need to expand contacts between Swedes and minorities in order to improve language learning and intercultural understanding.

By June 1995, the selection of municipalities had been completed. In March 1996, even the neighbourhoods had been appointed. Four municipalities were chosen to receive extra money for two neighbourhoods each and another four were chosen to receive money for one area. Six of these eight municipalities are located in the Stockholm region and the remaining two are in Göteborg and Malmö. The residential areas have to be spatially defined by the municipalities. (Government Decisions, June 29, 1995 and March 28, 1996)

It is worth noting that the new policy is indeed very tentative, without precise criteria for the selection of areas or municipalities and with loose formulations in terms of the aim of the policy. It emerges parallel to ongoing work in the assigned committees. It should, therefore, primarily be seen as a policy response to a rapid deterioration of the social situation in a number of urban neighbourhoods.

Figure 8 is an attempt to summarise the policy in terms of administrative structure, aims, guidelines and key actors. It can be noted that the present ministry in charge of the programme is the Ministry of the Interior. The government was reorganised in 1996, and the ethnic integration issues were then transferred to the Ministry of the Interior, which now controls both housing and immigrant issues.

In 1997, the programme was extended to another four municipalities, mainly with reference to the need of having non-metropolitan experiences added to further policy development in this area. Meanwhile, the policy is in the process of shifting in the direction of finding "best practices" more quickly, which will lead to a reduction of the scheme in some of the first eight municipalities and to an expansion of State involvement in some of the others (Regeringens proposition (Government Proposition)1997/98:16, Sverige, framtiden och mångfalden – från invandrarpolitik till integrationspolitik, p. 71.)

The State's involvement in policy development in specific urban neighbourhoods is not an entirely new phenomenon. However, the programme described above has some features that makes it very different from former types of policies.

1. The neighbourhood strategy is broader and less precise than former initiatives, which have been rather limited in scope, focusing, for instance, on improvements in service functions on the large housing estates.

2. New ways of planning have been encouraged, and these differ from other state policy actions in at least two important aspects. First, bottom-up initiatives are not only welcomed, they are seen as a backbone of the new strategy. Second, traditional sectorial divisions of responsibilities are said to be inadequate by the same State which has established the institutional structure and also has the power to change it.

Figure 8. General structure of the State's involvement in local development planning in "immigrant dense" neighbourhoods.

3. The criteria for receiving State support have not been defined. The selection of municipalities and neighbourhoods is not random – all supported neighbourhoods are part of the category "poor and immigrant dense residential areas" – but the selection lacks transparency. The grounds for denying 19 municipalities to take part in the programme in the first call have not been made public.

4. The area-based strategy in urban areas is rather similar to strategies in the regional policy domain, but the assisted areas have now been selected on the basis of a new concept of distance. While the physical distance to markets has been the key dimension for selecting areas striving for regional policy assistance, now the social distance to markets is the prime factor. This bears witness to a re-thinking of "problem areas" in Sweden and it opens up for a more urban-oriented view on the issue of labour market integration, state responsibility, and welfare issues in general.

5. For the first time, immigrant density has been explicitly used as a basic criteria for area-based policies. It is not explicitly stated in the guidelines, that the projects should be confined to immigrants residing in the selected areas, but this is, in fact, what the policy is all about. First, the programme was launched by the Minister of (immigrant) Integration, and it has also been financed through his part of the state budget. Second, all plans of actions are completely dominated by projects aimed at the immigrant population of the areas, and these plans have been approved by the Ministry of the Interior.

The last item is of interest in two ways. It runs contrary to the analysis conducted by the Commission of Metropolitan areas, the main conclusion of which is that it is class – not ethnicity – that is the key factor in the production of divided cities and distressed urban areas. It also contradicts the general idea of the new immigrant policy, which is that there should be no specific policy for immigrants who have spent several years in Sweden.

In my opinion this area-based programme has an advantage in the fact that the ethnic and race dimensions are recognised as important to the present process of a double exclusion (geographically and socially). It also confirms that the State has a responsibility for any exclusionary tendencies and that these cannot be seen as "local" problems, to be handled by the municipalities alone. But, at the same time, the area-based strategy can be viewed as a "blaming the victim"-strategy. As the welfare policy has changed from general to less general, from a central State controlled allocation of resources to a more decentralised control, these kinds of selective policies emerge as a necessary response to such a policy shift. Nevertheless, by pointing out specific neighbourhoods and certain groups of residents as targets of the policy, the State may be contributing to a stigmatisation process. The problem emerges – not least in the media – as a localised, basically ethnic, problem.

This is a true dilemma. Doing nothing is not enough and to fully restore the general welfare state with a high level of wealth redistribution from richer to poorer households seems to be economically and politically difficult in the short and middle-range time perspective. The conditions of the welfare state are more than ever affected by international developments, for Sweden, not least, EU-related developments.

It is possible to link the idea of area-based strategy to the model in Section 2. The emphasis in the strategy is placed on the idea that it is possible to modify the negative effects of the segregation-generated migration. By placing State intervention directly into the poor neighbourhoods and calling for grassroots activities, local institutional reforms, and improved human resources, the problem becomes less general and spatially confined to those who experience the problems in their everyday life. An alternative urban policy would be to look more into the regulating schemes operating at the top of the model (housing policy, welfare policy, immigrant integration policy).

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Regeringens proposition (Government Proposition) 1997/98:16, Sverige, framtiden och mångfalden – från invandrarpolitik till integrationspolitik. Stockholm.

Regeringsbeslut (Government decision), June 29, 1995. Regeringskansliet (the Swedish Cabinet Office and the Ministries): Stockholm.

Regeringsbeslut (Government decision), March 28, 1996. Regeringskansliet (the Swedish Cabinet Office and the Ministries): Stockholm.

Professor Roger Andersson
Department of Social and Economic Geography
Uppsala University, Box 1003
751 40 Uppsala
Sweden
Phone: +46 184712544
Mobiltel: +46 70 637 42 58
Fax: +46 18 4717418
Email: Roger.Andersson@kultgeog.uu.se