| 1. |
- Hallenberg, Mats, 1962-, et al.
(författare)
-
Towns go public : Urban services and the broadening ofurban communities in Scandinavia 1850–1920
- 2018
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- From the mid-nineteenth century and onwards, debates on urban public services became an integral part of municipal politics in Nordic towns. The industrial revolution came late in Nordic countries and the problem of how to integrate immigrants and factory workers into existing networks became paramount at the end of the century. This paper will discuss how municipal bodies tackled the problem of making the city accessible to new groups in the urban landscape. New forms of infrastructure had been introduced by private initiative: water, gas, electricity, tramways etc. In city councils and popular press, proponents of equal access argued that such services should be controlled and provided by municipal bodies. Their adversaries claimed that business operations were better run by private companies, and that municipal takeovers would only mean a larger burden for the tax-payers. The debates on how to improve and extend the reach of public services articulated new notions of community. The daily lives of women, children and the urban poor became a contested issue, and a new field for political solutions. Eventually, a future-oriented discourse became dominant where the solutions for today were expected to solve the problems of tomorrow as well.
|
|
| 2. |
- Linnarsson, Magnus, 1977-
(författare)
-
Shifting Regimes : State Formation and Political Reform in Early Modern Sweden
- 2019
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- How, and in what ways, could early modern state formation have promoted the development of modern democratic institutions? The research project Shifting Regimes: Representation, Administrative Reform and Institutional Change in Early Modern Sweden propose to answer this question by studying the interaction between the political and the administrative spheres during regime shifts in Sweden, c. 1527–1810. The wider purpose is to analyze the agency behind institutional change by comparing the actions of political leaders with those of major administrative bodies. To study how key decision-makers acted to influence the organization of the state the project will focus on several “critical junctures”, or periods when the Swedish state experienced substantial change in a relatively short time. This paper presents preliminary findings from one of the case studies in the larger project: the political regime shift and its consequences in 1765–1766. The case study applies the concept of ‘state capacity’ to give a theoretical explanation for the regime changes in Sweden in the mid 1760s.
|
|
| 3. |
- Linnarsson, Magnus, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
-
Urban space, private business and the common good : The Politics of the street in early 20th century Stockholm
- 2016
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper addresses political conflict over the organisation of public services in Sweden at the turn of the century, c. 1900. It’s part of a research project where we analyse similar discussions from the mid-seventeenth to the late twentieth century (Hallenberg & Linnarsson, 2016). Our starting point is that the organisation of public services is a political as well as an economical problem.In the paper we will demonstrate how the commercial restructuring of urban space challenged conservative notions of the common good as well as modern views of social reform and publicness. The modernization of public transport and telecommunications offered new possibilities for urban planning and extending the public sphere. The paper argues that political decisions played a vital role in shaping the management of public services. Discussions over who has the right to organise the common good has remained a leading trope in European history to this day, which makes it all the more important to see how political discourse on this subject have developed and changed over time.
|
|
