The Business of Improving Neighborhoods. A Critical Overview of Neighborhood-Based Business Improvement Districts (NBIDs) in Sweden

《The Business of Improving Neighborhoods. A Critical Overview of Neighborhood-Based Business Improvement Districts (NBIDs) in Sweden》

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作者: Dragan Kusevski, Maja Stalevska, Chiara Valli

来源: URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW,Vol.59,Issue4,P.

语言: 英文

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摘要: IntroductionIn September 2020, the Swedish government commissioned the National Board of Housing, Building and Planning to “review any obstacles for using the [Business Improvement District (BID)] method” to help address socio-economic exclusion in struggling urban areas. Stressing BIDs’ putative success in dealing with similar issues in other parts of the world, the government has argued that coalitions of local property owners, together with residents and public actors, could help “lift” socio-economically challenged neighborhoods out of poverty through real estate investments, crime prevention, and security measures (Regeringen 2020a). The governmental investigation comes after two decades in which BID-inspired partnerships have proliferated across struggling residential areas in the country, in the absence of a national enabling legislation. With widening socio-economic inequalities and deep-seated urban segregation becoming a major problem for metropolitan regions, BID partnerships appear to be increasingly hailed by Swedish policymakers as ostensibly successful solutions to place-based exclusion.Despite its growing relevance, we still lack an understanding of the local adaptation of the BID model in the (post-)welfare Swedish context, and the extent to which it has retained the neoliberal legacy of its international predecessors. Given their increasing proliferation and calls for institutionalization, it is pivotal to understand the role that the BIDs assume in the Swedish urban context, the ways in which they adapt to and influence ongoing urban transformations, and ultimately the possible implications of the adoption of BIDs as a tool for counteracting segregation. In this article, we aim to cast light on these questions by providing an overview of the existing residential BID landscape in Sweden. In order to grasp the BID model's relevance within the broader urban context in Sweden, we (1) provide a geographical investigation of the model and (2) analyze the political-economic rationales of BIDs in relation to their key constituent actors and the local institutional contexts in which they are embedded. We discuss our findings against the background of the transformation of the Swedish welfare model since the 1990s, in conjunction to the global variegated neoliberalization of urban governance (Brenner and Theodore 2002). By doing so, we also offer an empirical account of an understudied BID type—neighborhood-based BIDs (henceforth: NBIDs)—a Swedish local adaptation of the BID “policy in motion” (Ward 2007), so far absent from the academic literature. Finally, we aim to contribute to emerging public debates on the institutionalization of BIDs in Sweden as a “method […] to combat exclusion and create safer residential areas” (Regeringen 2020a), by offering critical insights into the ways in which NBID partnerships have been implemented in Sweden so far.Our analysis shows that NBIDs tend to appear in stigmatized residential neighborhoods with a high re-development potential and a long history of public area-based interventions. Emerging in an already neoliberalizing institutional landscape (Clark and Hedin 2009; Baeten, Berg and Hansen 2015) characterized by growing urban entrepreneurialism (Harvey 1989; Hertting, Thörn and Franzén 2021), NBIDs present themselves as a corrective to previous public policy failures by promoting property-oriented solutions. We argue that this can be interpreted as a move forward in the normalization of urban entrepreneurialism (Hertting, Thörn and Franzén 2021) in Swedish urban governance, as private actors for the first time explicitly co-create urban policy through NBIDs. The growing power assumed by private real estate actors in residential areas is enabled by the close alliances that the NBID partnerships forge with (increasingly business-minded) municipal housing companies (MHCs) and (growth-first oriented) local authorities. Ultimately, we maintain that their geographical and institutional contexts, as well as their organizational nature, should raise concerns about the socio-spatial effects NBIDs might have in terms of democracy, accountability, and uneven development.The remainder of the article is organized as follows. In the coming section, we elaborate on the study's methods. Then, we outline an appraisal of the international literature on BIDs with a particular focus on their conceptualization as vehicles of neoliberal urbanism. Following, we present the BID landscape in Sweden and delineate our object of study—the neighborhood-based BIDs. Further, in the following two sections, we analyze the geography of Swedish BIDs and their key actors within their institutional contexts. Finally, we discuss some critical implications of our findings.