From deficient planning to “incapable tenants”. Changing discourses on housing problems in Sweden

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Abstract
Since the mid 1970s, discourses on housing problems and problem tenants in Sweden have changed significantly. This article, which is based on official reports and an urban case study, accounts for this transformation at the national, the urban, as well as the work‐practice level of discourse from a constructivist perspective. The government's understanding of high vacancy rates were, in the 1970s, associated with deficient planning and building. However, in the 1980s, focus was diverted to a crisis in the public housing sector, which in turn highlighted the “noisy neighbour” as the source of their negative image. At the urban level the shifting discourse is signified by the municipal housing companies’ more selective policy in the 1980s, and the local social authorities’ growing role in housing for homeless clients. Contradictory demands from the role as landlords and as social workers, at the level of work‐practice, resulted in a redefinition and revaluation of homeless clients. In the beginning of the 1990s, these new practices at urban and street‐levels were sanctioned at the national level, thereby completing the shift from structural to individual accounts for housing problems.

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