Architecture and Retrenchment

Reviews / Votes

With consummate authority, Helena Mattsson tracks architecture's multifaceted, frequently counterintuitive role in the dismantling of Sweden's welfare state. Among so much else, this vivid, theoretically nuanced history of unaccountable power shows how biopolitics stitches architecture and urbanism to political economy, and vice versa. * Reinhold Martin, Professor of Architecture, Columbia University, USA * With devastating clarity and attention to how buildings and projects emerge, Helena Mattsson demonstrates that architects don't simply provide the image of the neoliberal built environment, they actively develop the concepts, practices and collaborations that bring it about. * Katie Lloyd Thomas, Professor of Theory and History of Architecture, Newcastle University, UK * Helena Mattson's book adds significantly to the growing literature on the 'postmodern and neoliberal turn' in architecture, by highlighting its complex and place-specific character: its focus on neoliberalisation's trajectory in the welfare-state bastion of Sweden provides a welcome corrective to stereotypical 'Anglosphere' narratives. * Miles Glendinning, Professor of Architectural Conservation, University of Edinburgh, UK *