In the early 2000s, the city of Malmö decided that Hyllie would be the municipality's highest priority building project. A few years later, excavators began work on the farmland around the Hyllie water tower, and in the autumn of 2008, Malmö Arena saw the light of day. Two years later, the railway station in front of the arena opened, and in 2012 Emporia, Scandinavia's largest shopping mall at the time, was inaugurated.
Hyllie was to become an exciting new neighbourhood in the city of Malmö, a pioneer in sustainability and a future home for 25,000 residents combined with office space for 15,000 jobs.
Ideal research site
For Alva Zalar, Hyllie was an ideal interdisciplinary research site. She wanted to find out how the visions of the neighbourhood, designed for sustainable development, relate to everyday life in the area.
’I am curious about the contradictions between sustainability and development. I also have a strong interest in queer theory and feminist theory, and it was exciting to approach this new large-scale and resourceful urban development project from a norm-critical perspective,' says Alva Zalar, an Agenda 2030 doctoral student at the Department of Architecture and the Built Environment at Lund University.
The term queer is often used as an umbrella term for a group of people with specific genders or sexualities. In Alva's studies, queer theory is used more broadly as a way of examining what deviates from the norms - in short, what is different.
She spent four years studying Hyllie from a variety of perspectives, both theoretically and through fieldwork. At one point, Zalar spent so much time in the shopping centre that some of the young people there thought she was an undercover police officer. Emporia turned out to be not only a shopping paradise, it also played a social role and was something of a leisure centre for young people from the area and surrounding districts.
Main results
So what are the most striking results of the research? Alva Zalar mentions three:
- The thesis provides a queer theoretical framework that can be used to understand and discuss how architecture creates norms and directions for how the city and urban life should develop. It also looks at how architecture, from the design of built environments to visions for new neighbourhoods, can stabilise or change these norms in different ways.
- The studies contribute to research that challenges problems such as 'business as usual' for which sustainable development is often criticised. The framework can improve understanding of how architecture can contribute to supporting unequal and unsustainable relationships in the city, and how support can be redistributed. An important focus has been to study a resourceful pioneering project rather than a marginalised area.
- The thesis challenges individual-centred perspectives on sustainability, suggesting instead that norm changes must take place at the community level through the redistribution of resources and the development of more sustainable infrastructures.
In conclusion, one of the main contributions of Alva's thesis is its critique of how sustainable urban development is often based on narrow normative ideals of how people should live their lives. Instead of focusing on individual behavioural changes through methods such as nudging, she argues that we need larger structural changes that allow for more heterogeneous urban life.
Spaces can be used in many ways
Alva Zalar also wants to contribute to the discussion about how we allocate resources.
’For example, we can think about why the shopping mall was given a large car park that both spreads out and makes it more convenient to drive than to use public transport, why the shopping mall is allowed to take up so much land when it is otherwise built in a space-efficient way, or why it is built on agricultural land. Just to play with the idea, what would have happened if the railway station had been located in a Million Programme area instead?
Another important conclusion is that urban planning cannot control people's behaviour to the extent that is often believed. The vision of people living more sustainably through a particular urban design can be difficult to achieve.
’The city is very heterogeneous and spaces can be used in many different ways. The fact that you can't control as much as you think can be seen as a threat to sustainable norms, but I see it more as an opportunity,' says Alva Zalar.
Because that's exactly what happened - when Alva Zalar studied everyday life in Hyllie, it turned out to be no different from other neighbourhoods.
’And that is something we can learn from.’
Queer as a City: Unsettling coherence in 'sustainable urban development' - portal.research.lu.se