The Entrepreneurial City in a Scandinavian Context - A Conceptual and Political Challenge?

The territorial dimensions of the state are undergoing substantial changes. New political entities – such as cities and regions – are gaining in importance. Cities and regions are using different strategies in order to strengthen their position in the inter-regional competition. At first, the Swedish experience seems to be an exception to this general development. The relatively small cities of Sweden usually function as the local arm of the welfare state and the regional policy aims at territorial cohesion through redistribution of income. I will use a study a study of the Swedish city Malmö, to show that the processes associated with entrepreneurial governance are manifested in Sweden as well. In the first part of the paper, I will argue that this might pose a challenge to the traditional redistributive goals of Swedish politics.

In the second part of the paper, I will focus on Malmö’s participation in the construction of a cross-border growth region – the Øresund region. To create a new region presupposes the blurring of traditional political borders. Urban governance, on the other hand, deals with strengthening the competitiveness of an individual city. The aim of this part of the paper is thus to analyze the relationship between strategies of urban governance and regional constructions. The potential tension between competition and cooperation is especially interesting in a transnational context. In fact, in the concluding remarks of the paper I will argue that, in spite of the rhetoric of a borderless region, we are witnessing the articulation of renewed territorial boundaries within the transnational region.