Abstract

Sweden and the broader region of Scandinavia have been widely praised for their efforts to develop and promote models of sustainability for the rest of the world to follow. Swedish international architecture and urban planning firms are driven by the advantage of being able to brand their projects as “Sustainable and Scandinavian”. In this sense, ‘the sustainable city’ has become a Swedish service to export. In 2007, the Swedish Trade Council initiated a marketing platform for eco-profiled companies under the name of “SymbioCity” in order to strengthen a coherent image of Swedish sustainable urban development. This paper seeks to explore the production of imaginaries at play in the performance of “SymbioCity”. It especially addresses the way in which notions of progress and a better city-life was presented to Chinese audiences in the Swedish pavilion at the World Expo in Shanghai in 2010, which had the overall theme of “Better City, Better Life”. The Swedish pavilion is here regarded as a node in a wider network of Swedish export of

sustainable urban planning services. I argue that the imaginaries which Sweden produces through activities associated with the SymbioCity underlines a view which equivocates “progress” with the notion of “decoupling”.

In presenting an image of decoupling as a Swedish experience possible to transfer to China it also establishes views of progress as linear and space as static, which in turn enables

questions of equality and spatial segregation to belong to another dimension. Consequently, “the social” becomes the constitutive other. Instead, I argue that we need imaginaries of better city-life based on an understanding of space as relational, which does not only challenge the concept of decoupling, but also of ”the social”. This paper aims to highlight the interests of “fact-builders” and open up some “black boxes” to make space for generative controversies of how to reconsider ways in which imaginaries are to be constructed, established, circulated and reformed.

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