Stockholmsregionen växer och utvecklas. Regionen förväntas växa med ytterligare cirka en miljon invånare fram till år 2050. Fler människor måste dela på stadens utrymmen och resurser. Stockholms ytterområden – där de flesta bor och kommer att bo – förtätas och rustas upp. Hur bygger vi då ett hållbart Stockholm, ett samhälle där alla kan få plats, delta, trivas och må bra?

The concept of social enterprise, as well as that of social entrepreneurship, were introduced in Sweden in the 1990s and have since then become increasingly common in practice, policy and academy. This chapter is based on many years of research on social enterprise, social entrepreneurship and civil society, as well as work on “mainstream” entrepreneurship, where business logic dominates the field. The chapter starts with a description of Swedish historical trajectory. During the 19th century, poor people’s protests were partly hearkened by an emerging middle class that was influenced by an international humanistic movement. The interest in non-profit social enterprises has also increased recently; this trend is particularly linked to the increased interest in private social-service providers in welfare-policy areas.

Entrepreneurship is celebrated as a miracle for all sorts of reasons and has increasingly been lauded for its capacity to ‘respond to needs’ or to ‘meet societal challenges’. The experiences from these transdisciplinary entrepreneurship and innovation initiatives reveal a continued need to develop working methods and mobilize resources for this work. The field of entrepreneurship consists of the academic literature as well as a broader discourse to which practitioners, media and policy makers also contribute arguments. Entrepreneurship research stems from the study of specific dynamic activities framed in economic theory. The spread of entrepreneurship into different spheres in society in recent decades is to a large extent characterized by the acclaimed characteristics of phenomena that have been nourished by decades of economic embeddedness. Epistemologically, the field of entrepreneurship can generally be characterized as rather pragmatic. In the field of entrepreneurship and innovation, there has been an obvious response to the call for sustainable development.

Our purpose is to explore the concept of “sustainability” when understood from a performative perspective, i.e. as a concept that is filled with meaning across time. Drawing on a 10 year-long study of the digital footprint of Stockholm Royal Seaport, claimed to be northern Europe's largest sustainable urban development district, we show that “sustainability” emerged as the project became associated with particular places, projects, histories, and technologies. This means that “sustainability” was local in that it was situated in the particular spatial context of the project; temporal in that it was situated in a particular time; and political in that it expressed particular values and perspectives. The study contributes to explaining why “sustainability” remains—and always will remain—a contested concept, which is why sustainability transitions are complex. Consequently, we suggest that the transition towards sustainability always involves the transition of sustainability, something that needs to be acknowledged in order for a transition to actually become sustainable.

The involvement of stakeholders in large scale urban sustainable development projects (LSUSDP.s) has proven difficult. The stakeholders are distributed across the geographical area, and they have stakes not only in the LSUSDP, but in the geographical location where the project takes place. To understand stakeholder management in "distributed projects", we propose abandoning the "inside-out" perspective where the project is the point of departure, and focus on the emergence of stakeholders across time. Adopting such a performative, "outside-in," perspective on the longitudinal and digital study of a LSUSDP, we are able to map how actors became stakeholders in the project through their actions. The paper makes four contributions. First, we reconceptualize stakeholder involvement by adopting a performative perspective, whereby "stakeholders" are envisaged as emergent and non-fixed. Second, we demonstrate how such a reconceptualization may be applied to the analysis of an empirical case. Third, we show that stakeholder involvement is not merely the result of stakeholder management but something that happens over time, through the material and discursive actions of those that become stakeholders. Finally, the paper contributes with an illustration of how the online, digital footprint, of a project may be useful to understand the emergence of a project.

Transition into modernity takes very different roads, depending on thesequencing of bureaucracy and democratic regime. This is demonstrated bycomparing Sweden and Greece. At an early stage of the long-term modernisationof Swedish society, due to early penetration of the internal territory andbefore the extension of suffrage and political modernisation, a number ofstate organisations were established at the interstices between state and society,creating direct relations between the state and society. The impressiveLantmäteriet, the organisation of tax authorities, the establishment ofauthorities for registering the population and the Tabellverket are typicalillustrations of such organisational structures. Such organisations functionedas social mechanisms that elucidated society making it legible and thusstrengthened the infrastructural capacity of the state. In Greece, where thestate was built after political modernisation, the establishment of similarorganisations proved to be more difficult. Although there is evidence thatsimilar Swedish practices were known in Greece to be possible paths, theywere not chosen. The establishment of a land registry system, for instance,was discussed in the decades prior to the 1871 land reform. On other issues,such choices could not be materialised given opposition or political countermobilisationto abolish the reforms after they were approved by parliament.These reform efforts were rather short-lived or countered by new reforms andexemptions, creating an ambiguous labyrinth of regulations of statesocietyrelations and a state without the capacity to intervene in society and implementlogistically political decisions throughout the realm. On the whole, thestate remained a distant entity, mostly a distrusted one, and relations between the state and society were mediated by parties and by social and kinshipbasednetworks.

Highlighting several theoretical and empirical contributions of the preceding chapters, the epilogue presents a relational typology for understanding the roles of different types of resources for civil society organizations. This chapter explores variations in the generalizability/specificity and convertibility of economic, symbolic, and human resources and suggests approaching civil society as a landscape of organizations that coexist but have different origins, futures, and interdependencies. The constellations of relationships among organizations and between organizations and their environments are hierarchical and dynamic. They are constantly shifting, closing, and opening spaces that a broad variety of organizational forms and missions can inhabit.

The Swedish universal welfare state has transformed since the 1990s into a mixed welfare model with increasing deregulation, recommodification, and reverse distribution from the public to the private sector where capital and influence have concentrated. In major cities such as Stockholm, this has resulted in a polarization where groups in the city centre and residential areas have accumulated wealth and resources while groups in marginalized suburbs and neighbourhoods have faced increasing social exclusion and marginalization. Public sector social work has long focused on individual case work, whereas this development calls for increasing community work initiatives. In this article, we analyse the rise of urban social movements mobilizing for inclusion, influence, and social justice as important aspects of contemporary community work in the Swedish urban periphery. Through analysis of semi-structured interviews with community workers and activists as well as media articles, reports, and web-based materials, the results show how the mobilization of the organization Megafonen has contributed to the development of new social institutions and urban commons.

När nya bostadsområden byggs eller renoveras brottas samhällsplanerare med önskan att skapa förutsättningar för ’det goda livet’ i förortens bostäder. Bostadsområden som byggs eller renoveras lägger grunden för det lokala samhällets utveckling på längre sikt.

Därför är det viktigt att utreda vilka kan vara de viktigaste förutsättningarna för ett framgångsrikt bostadsområde. Inom forskargruppen Reinvent vid Södertörns högskola har vi brottats med frågor kring lyckade och misslyckade förorter. Den utsatthet som finns i många förorter bildar en bas för vår forskning som kretsar kring hållbarhet i förortsmiljön. Vi har identifierat tre faktorer som kan vara viktiga för hållbara förorter.

A debate about emerging models of urban living labs (ULLs) 2.0 is taking place in the literature, highlighting the importance of social aspects. The aim of this paper is to examine feminist ULLs as a potential source of social sustainability. This is conducted through a case study of a feminist ULL in Sweden, where girls and young women, together with multiple professional stakeholders, used Minecraft to redesign a public square in their neighbourhood - a marginalised suburban area of Stockholm. Data was collected through participant observations of six experimental labs during 1 year, surveys of the ULL participants, and an analysis of the fnal Minecraft designs. The empirical fndings reveal a process of mutual learning between girls and professional stakeholders, where the girls were viewed as place experts. The fndings also reveal that the girls’ visions include a socially sustainable transition of the urban square: from patriarchal to inclusive, from grey to green, and from a transit area to a meeting-place. There were some diferences between girls and professional stakeholders. Whereas the professionals tended to emphasise security in their visions, the girls emphasised liveability. Although more research is needed, this paper concludes that feminist ULLs can be a possible source of social sustainability. However, the ULL process must both be inclusive, and at the same time unlock long-term transformation in the physical environment.