The Institute for Urban Research (IUR) seeks to consolidate and widen the urban research environment at Malmö University. Based at the Faculty of Culture, IUR exposes contemporary challenges emanating from urbanization processes. IUR brings together knowledge from various disciplines to propose possible solutions to urban societal challenges. IUR engages with citizens, civil society, private actors and public authorities to communicate their research results and find ways to implement solutions. Their main research themes are housing and urban renewal, social sustainability, urban migration, urban economics,
Research themes
Housing and Urban Renewal
The housing question is arguably the largest contemporary urban challenge in northern countries. The current housing crisis is generally described as a housing shortage. According to the Swedish Housing Board there is a need for 440 000 additional dwellings between 2016 and 2020 – the size of another Stockholm municipality – or 88 000 additional dwellings per year. Sweden has the lowest rate of housing construction in relation to the population growth, even though construction activities have increased lately. This implies that the housing shortage is growing year by year, in spite of recently increased construction activity. Sweden, with its low housing production, has the highest level of overcrowding in the Nordic world: 14 pct of the population lives in overcrowded dwellings in 2016 – up from 10 pct in 2007. The number of young people who continue to live with their parents is higher than ever before. Meanwhile, housing prices continue to rise. Sweden now belongs to the most housing debt-laden advanced economies.
The contribution of IUR to the research field will be to investigate how they can redefine the basic housing question in Swedish cities as a question of housing inequality (growing unequal distribution) rather than merely a housing shortage (that can be built away by developers). By problematizing acute urban issues in new ways, they seek to find innovative solutions. Housing is increasingly unevenly distributed amongst income groups, resulting in a growing housing precariat and decreasing housing wealth on one side of the spectrum, and in growing housing ownership and housing wealth on the other side. Interpreting the housing crisis not as a problem of mere shortage – that may be built away under favourable market conditions – but as housing inequality forces them to come with new questions and innovative solutions.
Social Sustainability
The Institute for Urban Research seeks to consolidate existing research on vulnerable groups in the city, conflicts emanating from ethnic, gender and class inequalities, and conflicts and vulnerabilities stemming from recent immigration.
The current wave of urbanization has given rise to a range of new urban visions that increasingly inform policy-making practices: smart city, resilient city, shared city, sustainable city, etc. What they have in common is that precisely social issues and the place of weaker groups in cities remains underemphasized both in research and in practice. The Institute for Urban Research wants to understand, as an overall research question, how issues of social sustainability can gain a more prominent place in urban policies and urban research. Social sustainability will be placed in a historical perspective since it cannot be understood unless we understand what they build on. Social sustainability will be placed in its geographical context to understand where sustainability concepts originate and in what ways they travel and find implementation elsewhere. In times of increasing urban polarization, segregation and inequality, the Institute seeks to play a prominent in giving urban social sustainability a more prominent role on the policy and research agenda.
Urban Migration
We live in an era of human mobility that is markedly urban. Migrants, internal and international, move to cites and urban areas; they bring diversity and connect localities within and across state borders. Migration and migrants are shaping cities, and the life of migrants are in turn shaped by cities, their people, organizations and rules. Migration is immanent to ongoing processes of globalization, urbanization and transformed relationships between urban centres as well as between the rural and urban. This calls for new approaches to urban governance of migration. In the view of this development, and with a theoretical base in the critique of methodological nationalism, we set out to contribute to research on the dynamics, consequences and management of migration on the city scale. This involves empirical and analytical focuses on how transnational practices and identities of belonging among migrants and non-migrants is shaping and is shaped by various localities. We need to understand how transnational linkages, sometimes institutionalised into urban partnerships, among migrant groups, local governments, civil society and the private sector respond to migration and shape urban development as well as the life opportunities of migrants in cities.
Urban Economics
Urban economics is a research field that focus on how households, firms, and capital integrate across space in metropolitan areas. Digitalisation, globalisation and educational upgrading have, for many, led to increased wages, less routine work, and, over all, increased wealth. There are also less desirable outcomes, such as divergence between urban and rural locations, labour market polarisations and increased inequality within countries. Changes in the occupational structure caused by adopting new technologies seems to have reinforced existing spatial inequality. New jobs are created in cities with high concentration of highly-skilled workers, while locations with low density of high-skilled workers experience job losses. Despite modern information technologies, firms choose to locate close to other firms and customers. This concentration of economic activity poses challenges on all kinds of functionalities in cities, as well as in rural areas. It affects housing, physical infrastructure as well as public services. An important aspect of this is that scarcity of land tends to increase land rent, and thereby posing a great challenge to e.g. the provision of affordable housing. There are also new patterns emerging with economic growth concentrated to some large urban areas, resulting in increasing spatial inequality. While these issues have gained increased interest in recent years, researchers still know little about the impact of the supply of land on urban and regional economics and for different socioeconomic groups. What are the socio-economic effects of new infrastructure? How patterns of regional inequality influence the interrelation of housing, labour market and mobility? How these trends influence the spatial interaction between households and firms?
Mobilities
Mobilities is a research field that has developed from transport studies in the social sciences and cultural studies. It opened up the ‘black box’ of traditional transport studies by adding more complex and contextualized understandings of the meaning of movements and flows of people, artefacts, capital and risks, in space. Dimensions of power are deeply embedded into the field. The technology development of mobile telecommunication, cyber technologies, and software engineering are of substantial importance for introducing new modes of transportation and make people connected. However, not everyone has access to the latest technological devices or is connected to the mobility fast-track where globalized nomads have freedom of movement. Left behind are people, poorly connected to the networks, with difficulties to access everyday destinations because of poor access to affordable transportation or lack of opportunities. Justice is an important question to further explore as well as questions about different mobility regimes and what institutional strategies work towards a sustainable development. Additional questions concern the development of new methodologiesa to measure socioeconomic values of accessibility, justice and environmental sustainability.
Urban Ecology
Global commitments to combat climate change and attain more equitable urban environments have thus been given new urgency by the Paris Accord and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It is increasingly clear, however, that ostensibly neutral concepts like “sustainable urbanism” obscure issues of power and inequality. The research therefore interrogates the meaning of “sustainability” amidst conditions of political and socio-economic precarity. Why? Sustainability as a discourse, practice, or complex of infrastructures is often not evenly distributed or equally accessible. Furthermore, while there is a lengthy history of state-led urban experimentation, one significant change is the diminished role of the state in the creation and implementation of urban design schemes. Conditions of “actually existing neoliberalism” have radically changed civic engagement vis-à-vis the state. Under current regimes of global capitalism and urban development, it is important to focus on those who fall outside the scope of state-led, top-down interventions made on behalf of sustainable or climate-friendly urbanism. Class, gender and ethnic inequality must be foregrounded to capture the full extent of climate change and sustainability efforts in cities around the world.
