BEYOND ‘BAD DENSITY’ AND TERRITORIAL STIGMA: An Infrastructure Access Lens on Suburban Exclusion

Abstract

Segregation and social exclusion in postwar suburban housing estates are typically addressed as problems of residential location. For decades, postwar suburbs in all corners of the world have been targeted as designated sites of punitive urban intervention, grounded in territorial stigma and normative notions of density. However, as products of political campaigns aimed at constructing networked city regions, we argue that postwar suburbs should be examined for the political work they aimed to perform: Granting or denying access to the networked city and, by extension, modern citizenship. Drawing on political and cultural geography, transport history and mobilities studies, this article forwards an infrastructural access lens to critically engage with processes of social exclusion in suburban housing ensembles. Using Stockholm as the subject of a case study, we show that transport policy and planning have historically been central in undergirding welfare politics and citizenship, offering privileged sites for exploring how processes of inclusion and exclusion have been wired onto the infrastructural grid over time. We propose a focus on infrastructural access—to where, for whom and for what subjectivity—to open up the discussion on suburban exclusion by focusing on people's ability or inability to move around the networked city rather than on where they reside.