Careful place

Matters of care built into the socially sustainable city district

Abstract

In Vallastaden, a newly built city district in Sweden, place is carefully crafted to make it into a role model city district of the future. These “careful places” are built with care, but also require physical care, such as cleaning and gardening, as well as administrative care through paperwork and organizing. This article focuses on how thinking with care in the analysis of the planning for and living in Vallastaden can contribute to highlighting the complexities often made invisible in city planning and put what is marginalized at the centre. The article empirically studies how the planning of careful places is done in planning documents and builds on workshops with residents in Vallastaden. In the workshops, inhabitants of Vallastaden are asked to draw their own map of their city district, so called mental maps. These mental maps are discussed with regard to how place in Vallastaden enables care, is cared for, and what troubles they bring. Careful place has the power to create tensions in planning, which is handled by making some matters absent or translated into other matters of care. Likewise, careful place is enacted with multifold practices in the everyday life of the residents in Vallastaden, intertwining self-care, care for the environment as well as a caring space for sharing problems in virtual space. Staying with the troubles of careful place creates awareness of otherwise neglected matters, such as how socio-economic diversity is translated into diversity in housing, and through this approach turn to the ethico-politics of urban planning.