Renovation year zero: Swedish Welfare Landscapes of Anxiety, 1975 to the Present.

The Swedish Million Program built one million dwelling units from 1965 to 1974, largely according to late modernist design principles, but many new neighborhoods were quickly stigmatized for their monolithic forms and unfinished outdoor spaces, as well as for social problems with which they quickly became associated. To remedy this, the Swedish national government initiated a new program in 1975 to provide subsidies for renovations of areas with multifamily housing constructed before 1975, the so-called Environmental Improvement Subsidies (Miljöförbättringsbidrag). These subsidies were offered until 1986 and ultimately supported about 1,700 renovation projects. In this paper, I examine the use of subsidies during this "Year Zero" of the project and some early critiques of their results. Critically, many Environmental Improvement projects included participatory planning - explicit attempts to involve residents in direct discussions - an orientation that remains into the present day when renovations for Million Program areas are being conducted (sometimes in the same places). When the expertise that produced the original plans for Million Program neighborhoods was immediately treated with suspicion for its topdown approach, I analyze how new bottomup methods of resident participation in design emerged, how they were implemented, and how they were evaluated in the 1980s and 1990s to ask: Why was renovation in this early period already seen as necessary? Why and how were participatory methods used in such renovations? Why are methods similar to those used as early as the mid-1970s expected to have different results today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]