Visions of Utopia: Sweden, the BBC and the Welfare State

Drawing on manuscripts and transcripts of BBC programme output, and material from the Radio Times, and the BBC’s The Listener magazine, this article analyses radio talks and programmes that focused on Sweden in the immediate years after the Second World War when the Swedish model was widely popularised abroad. The article argues that BBC output entangled domestic politics and transnational ideas around post-war reconstruction and welfare. Sweden was used as a lens through which a modern welfare state could be visualised and justified. This was however Utopia in two senses since the image of Sweden presented was in itself a highly idealised representation

Spatial theory and human behavior

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45971/1/10110_2005_Article_BF01952731.pd

Even in Sweden: racisms, racialized spaces, and the popular geographical imagination

Allan Pred writes compellingly about the reawakening of racism throughout Europe at the end of the twentieth century - even in Sweden, a country widely regarded as the very model of social justice and equality. Many thousands of non-European and Muslim immigrants and refugees who took advantage of Sweden's generous immigration policies now find themselves the object of discrimination and worse. Through the cascading juxtaposition of many voices, including his own, Pred describes the intensifying cultural racism of the 1990s, the proliferation of negative ethnic stereotypes, and the spatial segregation of the non-Swedish. He quotes the newspaper Dagens Nyheter: "It is high time that Sweden reconsider its self-image as the stronghold of tolerance" (July 21, 1998), and analyzes the strategies that allow people to maintain that self-image. Perhaps the greatest strength of Even in Sweden is that Pred gives to the social consequences of global economic restructuring some very specific faces and places and a multitude of expressions of human will, both ill and good

Urban system

Urban systems research utilizes the language of systems theory to grasp the complexity of the urban and the city. This entry explains the basic principles of urban systems theory and outlines some important pitfalls. Depending on research focus and priority, urban systems have been bracketed geographically and conceptually in different ways in different time periods. In the past, defining the city as a bounded entity was uncontroversial and the difference between interurban and intraurban processes seemed self‐evident. As urbanization intensifies, urban boundaries blur, prompting us to continuously scrutinize the scales of urban systems. The usefulness of urban systems thinking is illustrated through an appreciation of the historical urban systems models of American geographer Allan Pred from the 1960s and 1970s. Pred's work is contextualized in the present by briefly comparing it in terms of continuity and change with world city analysis, an important contemporary application of urban systems analysis