Jenny Lindblad
Researcher
Details
Researcher
About me
PhD, Planning and Decision analysis, Urban and regional studies.
I work as a researcher and teacher at the division of Urban and Regional Studies, in connection with the research platform Space Politics and Ecologies.
I am interested in how practices, expertise and materialities shape cities and urban life, specifically with regards to how environmental concerns figure in urban planning and decision-making processes. I work with perspectives from anthropology, science and technology studies, planning studies, with a geographical focus on France and Sweden. Previously, I have explored these issues with regards to ticket barriers in Stockholm metro stations. I have been contributing editor for AnthroPod, the podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. I am a board member of The Swedish Anthropological Association (SANT).
More on my ongoing research projects below. Feel free to get in touch about access to publications.
I am happy to hear from master students who wish to work on urban planning through qualitative methods with topics related to, for instance, planners practices, bureaucracy, spatial and environmental justice, and questions around food production and land use in urban regions.
Ongoing projects
Muddy terrains of environmental expertise: Ethnographies of changing and competing knowledge of wetland restoration in times of climate change
Funded by the Swedish Research Council / Vetenskapsrådet 2025-2027
Freshwater is an increasingly acute issue for cities in the context of the multifaceted climate crisis. In response to this, restoration of freshwater urban ecosystems is gaining momentum. However, restoration is far from straightforward, as diverse ways of knowing, valuing and living with ecosystems are at stake in claims about imperatives for their remaking on the ground. By investigating the multiplicity, diversity and ordering of expertise that inform urban restoration, this project seeks to identify dominant knowledge regimes, value conflicts and local ecosystem understandings that underpin contemporary ecosystem restoration.
It does so by addressing the overall research question: How is dominant restoration expertise constructed and maintained? This overall research question is operationalized through the following questions:
- What different understandings about specific wetland sites are produced, and through what means, in the planning and performing of restoration interventions?
- What relations of consensus and competition exist across the identified wetland understandings and value frameworks?
- How are various understandings and value frameworks sorted in and out from restoration interventions, and on what grounds?
The project is situated within the critical scholarly work that explores the mechanisms of ecosystem restoration actions and other forms of environmental management through which unsustainabilities are sustained and hegemonic relationships cemented. The empirical entry-point for the project is urban wetland restoration in the region of Stockholm.
Completed projects
Humus Economicus : Soil Blindness and the value of "Dirt" in Urbanized landscapes.
This art and research project inquiries into the value and future of soil in urbanized landscapes. It seeks to draw attention to radically altered human-soil relations, the invisible work of soils, and practices of soil care in a time when soils are sealed and degraded at rapid rates. Humus economicus is initiated by artist and environmental humanities researcher Janna Holmstedt at National Historical Museums, Sweden. Funded by Formas – a Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (2021–2024).
Outcomes include:
Holmstedt, J., Lindblad, J., Fredengren, C., Åberg, C., Lobell, M., & Wegsjö, K. (in press spring 2025). Cultivating Ecosystem Conviviality Trough Soil Arts and Urban Gardening. In P. McElwee, M. Hsu, K. Allen, R. Gould & J. He (Eds). Routledge Handbook of Cultural Ecosystem Services. Routledge.
Holmstedt, J. & Lindblad, J. (2024). Elementär planering: Jordade städer och gemenskapande naturkulturer. PLAN, nr. 3-4.
Lobell, M. & Lindblad. J. (2023) Arwidsson Talk Podcast, Under Jord- om jordblindhet i staden https://arwidssonstiftelsen.se/podcast/under-jord/
Lindblad, J. (2021) Jordlager i lagar – ytvärden och djupvärden / Soil Layers and Laws – Surface Values and Deep Values of Soils in the City. Blog post on project webpage: https://humuseconomicus.se/sv/nyheter/jordlager-i-lagar-ytvarden-och-djupvarden/
Who develops the city of the future? Mapping the contested field of urban development expertise
Funded by FORMAS 2021-2023
In a rapidly urbanizing world increased attention is being paid to the development of urban environments. At the same time the array of experts who are expected to design and develop the cities of tomorrow is currently in a state of flux. New competencies are emerging, which all offer very different visions and trajectories for the development of cities. Therefore, it is today important to ask: ‘who shapes the city of the future – and to what effects?’. In order to address this question it is necessary to map and analyze the variegated landscape of expertise that currently contributes to shaping the cities of the future. The purpose of the project is thereforeto analyzethe patterns of competition and collaboration between assemblages of expertise within the urban development field in Sweden, and the effects of these patterns on the production of concrete urban environments. It develops a novel methodology of ‘collaborative field mapping’, working with practitioners to map different domains of expertise and their relations, showing how different formations of expertise build complementarity and/or competition at various stages of the urban development process. This material is supplemented by in-depth interviews and document studies to analyze how communities of expertise organize and legitimate their knowledge and practices.
Vad kan vi lära oss av 100-åringar? Värdeskapande kring långvariga småbutiker i stadskärnor
(Finansierat av Hakon Swenson Stiftelsen 2022-2023)
En av handelsforskare sällan uppmärksammad butikskategori i dagens moderna handelslandskap är små, fristående innerstadsbutiker som existerat sen tidigt 1900-tal. I projektet”Vad kan vi lära oss av 100-åringar? Värdeskapande kring långvariga småbutiker i stadskärnor” undersöker vi frågan om hur det kan förklaras att dessa butiker alls finns kvar. Med ett micro-sociologiskt perspektiv med fokus på värdeskapande, studerar vi ett 10-tal butiker i svenska storstäder. Vi kompletterar ekonomiska förklaringar med en mer värde-inklusiv ansats som undersöker hur olika aktörer – såsom butiksägare själva, personal, kunder, hyresvärdar, grossister, myndigheter, branschföreningar, politiker – i tid och rum ser och har sett på de här butikernas existens.
Projektet genomförs under två år av två företagsekonomer från Handelshögskolan i Stockholm och Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research (Score) och en socialantropolog med inriktning på urbana studier vid Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan. Syftet är att bidra med efterfrågad kunskap om små butikers villkor att överleva i stadskärnor, och att bredda synen på detaljhandelns roll i samhällsutvecklingen av attraktiva städer. Empiriskt genomförs tre delprojekt: en policystudie 1900–2020 om offentliga organisationers syn på detaljhandelns roll i stadsutveckling; en etnografisk studie av 3 butiker inom Livsmedel, Konfektion och Hobby; samt en historiskt inriktad studie av värden, värdeskapande och överlevnadsstrategier kring 10 butiker från de valda butikskategorierna. Förutom en vetenskaplig artikel kommer projektet att generera en bok på svenska där de studerade butikerna illustreras i både ord och bild liksom presentationer av forskningsresultaten för intresserade praktiker.
Publications include:
Lindblad, J., Wiberg, S., Tamm Hallström, K., & Gustafsson Nordin, I. (2024). Maintaining the good store: lessons about caring practices from Swedish 100-year-old retail stores. The International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/09593969.2024.2371460
Tamm Hallström, K., Wiberg, S., Gustafsson Nordin, I. & Lindblad, J., (2024). Detaljhandeln under pandemin - Hur gick det för 100-åringarna? Handelsrådet Forskningsrapport 2024:8. https://handelsradet.se/app/uploads/2025/01/Rapport-2024_84.pdf
Doctoral thesis
Planning Contexts: Bureaucracy and rule relations in French Urbanism
My doctoral thesis (2020) investigated the social life of a planning bureaucracy in Bordeaux, France, in a time of national reforms aimed at transforming bureaucratic procedures. By following the making and uses of a land-use plan, I explored what calls for flexibility and negotiation in reforms aimed at public administrations come to mean in the quotidian work of bureaucrats, planners and politicians.
Organizing sustainable cities: planning, strategy, governance, management
(Funded by Vetenskapsrådet 2015-2018)
The Organizing sustainable cities project aims at grasping how urban sustainable development becomes ‘translated’ as a concept and in practice through the networks and practice spheres of present-day city administrations. The project particularly focuses on the challenges faced by broad organizing ambitions, such as integrative strategies for sustainable urban development, when confronted with incongruent domains of practice that operate according to different protocols and in accordance with diverging values, norms and procedures. By following how actors in different spheres of practice in city administrations translate sustainability into practice in their own domain and make sense of it, the project will contribute to a better understanding of when, how and why this generates friction, incoherence and sometimes open conflict as to what constitutes sustainable urban development and how to ‘do’ it in practice.
Project publications include:
Metzger, J., & Lindblad, J. (Eds.). (2020). Dilemmas of sustainable urban development: A view from practice. Routledge.
Adolfsson, P., Lindblad, J., & Peacock, S. (2021). Translations of sustainability in urban planning documents—A longitudinal study of comprehensive plans in three European cities. Cities, 119. 103360. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2021.103360
Lindblad, J. (2023). Planning context: Flexible plans and mayoral authority in French urban planning.Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,41(4), 615-636. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758231196412
Courses
Degree Project in Urban and Regional Planning, Second Cycle (AG212X), teacher | Course web
Project Sustainable Urban Planning - Strategies for Urban and Regional Development (AG2129), course responsible, teacher, assistant | Course web
Theory of Science and Research Methodology for Planning and Design (AG2126), course responsible, teacher, assistant | Course web