Redistribution by Urban Design
Centrality, Ecology, and Transition in Järvafältet, 1930–2030
Time: Fri 2025-10-10 09.00
Location: F3 (Flodis), Lindstedtsvägen 26 & 28, Stockholm
Video link: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/68020704062
Language: English
Subject area: Architecture, Urban Design
Doctoral student: Adrià Carbonell , Arkitektur, landskap och städer, Applied Urban Design
Opponent: Professor Tom Avermaete, Chair of the Theory and History of Urban Design, ETH Zürich
Supervisor: Professor Ann Legeby, Arkitektur, landskap och städer
QC 20250915
Abstract
This thesis examines the concept of redistribution in urban design. Situated in a context of planetary urbanisation, growing global inequalities, and climate emergency, it proposes a disciplinary shift that operates within a paradigm of redistribution rather than growth. Through it, I envisage a transition that moves away from traditional urban development and towards the readjustment of existing distribution patterns based on the reallocation of available resources, services, networks, and infrastructures.
The thesis adopts a threefold approach to spatial redistribution, which is simultaneously theoretical, historical, and projective. Theoretically, it reframes the economic and political notion of redistribution as a spatial and environmental question. Historically, it examines the forms of redistribution that have guided modernist patterns of urbanisation, with a special focus on the Swedish welfare state period (1930s-1970s), using the northern suburban expansion of Stockholm as a case study. In projective terms, it understands urban planning and design as redistributive practices invested in the provision of social and ecological welfare. As such, the notion of redistribution is used as a frame and instrument for spatial analysis and as a projective principle for urban design.
This approach is tested in relation to Järvakilen (the Järva Green Wedge), the longest of the ten green wedges that infiltrate Stockholm’s metropolitan area. Spanning more than thirty kilometres from the city centre into the northern Uppland territory, Järvakilen offers a compelling case for exploring interrelations between urban and ecological systems. In considering this site, I argue that a renewed approach to socioecological redistribution should not have a merely reactive rationale – on the contrary, it should embody a transformative potential nested in the projective realm. Ultimately, the thesis argues that territorial design can shift from merely fixing unequal patterns to shaping new systems that anticipate inequalities, thus adding to the redistribution of resources by way of a ‘predistribution’ of life forms and forms of life.