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Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures: Permeability and Politics of the Closed Loop of Hammarby Sjöstad

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Redeploying Urban Infrastructure

Abstract

This chapter explores the complex and contested processes and practices involved in rebundling infrastructure systems as part of ecological urbanism objectives in Stockholm. Focusing on the well-known eco-district of Hammarby Sjöstad, it traces some of the important disjunctures between vision, discourse, practice and material politics in and around the reconfiguring and integration of energy, waste and water systems, within the context of wider debates and tensions over future urban planning in the city. Across model and conception, limits and deviations in practice, and evaluation and transfer, eco-city integration and circularity is exposed as a struggle to contain and control systems, flows and engagements which are often intractable.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It was framed as “a natural extension of the city” (City of Stockholm 2014a) in a period when urban planning policy in Stockholm was oriented by ideas of densification and ‘building the city inwards’.

  2. 2.

    There were around 20,000 residents as of 2015. The original project was due for completion in 2018, but there remains ongoing work and a new focus on ‘renewing the new city’.

  3. 3.

    As one interviewee explained, ‘The only reason they made the Environmental Programme was because Sydney, one of the reasons they got it in 2000 was their Environmental Programme, so Stockholm said they should make the Environmental Programme a bigger part of the bid to win. But then they didn’t’ (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013).

  4. 4.

    This ownership and control of utility companies was seen by some practitioners as crucial to the idea of constructing a recycling model: ‘I don’t think it would have been possible today, when we only still have one of them, and the other two are more or less private’ (Hammarby Sjöstad planner interview, May 2005).

  5. 5.

    Water production takes place at Norsberg (60% of production for Stockholm) and Lovö (40% of production for Stockholm) drinking water plants close to Lake Malaren where the water is taken from (Myllymaa 2002).

  6. 6.

    Electricity is produced, transported, distributed and sold based on the Nord Pool system, so it is difficult to trace the origin of electricity consumed in Stockholm in the Nordic countries (or further afield as Vattenfall have activities in Germany and Poland).

  7. 7.

    The Fortum district heating system is calculated to run on a hierarchy of base load, mid load and peak load plants in which Hammarbyverket operates only as a mid load facility. Base load plants for the central-south network are Värtaverket, which is still part run on coal, and Högdalenverket CHP plants. This means that it is nigh on impossible to distinguish which plant serves which part of Stockholm and when, i.e. to follow exactly where the ‘water molecules’ go (Fortum Värme official interview, August 2013).

  8. 8.

    Around two thirds of Stockholm households were connected to Henriksdal plant and a third to the Bromma treatment plant (Myllymaa 2002).

  9. 9.

    The whole of the treated wastewater flow from Henriksdal is now sent to Hammarbyverket, where heat pumps recover heat for the district heating network (Email communication following Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013).

  10. 10.

    The total installed solar capacity is, in any case, extremely small at 55 kW, which pales in comparison with the far larger production facilities for heat or cogeneration. Part of the problem is the lack of a feed-in regulation in Sweden which currently stops small-scale decentralized energy systems from selling their production to the grid (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013; HS2020 official interview, August 2013).

  11. 11.

    Vestbro argues that this was a direct decision of the conservative right-wing majority because of its impact on urban form: ‘Abandoning experiments with urine separation in multi-family housing meant that local access roads could be made more modest since they did not have to accommodate trucks emptying the urine tanks’ (Vestbro 2005, p. 8).

  12. 12.

    Some housing associations in Hammarby Sjöstad are fed up with the price of energy (HS2020 official interview, August 2013) and with the fact that they argue that the construction companies who built housing in the eco-district failed to deliver on their promises and obligations to provide energy efficient apartment blocks and instead, by cutting their own costs at the time of construction, effectively ‘passed on to residents’ the cost of energy efficiency (Lundberg 2013).

  13. 13.

    The HS2020 group produced a report of a study of around 100 residential buildings in the district which showed energy performance varying between 55 and 185 kWh/m2 with an average of 117 kWh/m2, highlighting the very diverse quality of buildings (HS2020 2013). This study has, however, been contested by KTH researchers for its reliance on performance data from a variety of different consultant firms which used different methods at different times.

  14. 14.

    There is an average of 12 international study visits per week (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013).

  15. 15.

    Some critical researchers in Stockholm argue indeed that the international marketing of Swedish environmental technology has been one of the main aims of the City of Stockholm’s recent urban policy and projects (Wangel 2013). This fits with the idea that the projects are a showcase for other things.

  16. 16.

    The ‘social integration’ department of the municipality was extremely critical of the progressive reorientation of the project away from the 50% provision of rental housing by municipal housing companies that had been outlined at the beginning of the project (City of Stockholm social integration department official interview, May 2005).

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  1. LATTS, Université Paris Est, Marne-la-Vallée, France

    Jonathan Rutherford

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Rutherford, J. (2020). Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures: Permeability and Politics of the Closed Loop of Hammarby Sjöstad. In: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1_5

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