Jennifer Mack

Jennifer Mack is Associate Professor and Docent at KTH, a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (2022-2027), an elected member of The Young Academy of Sweden (2024-2029), and board member substitute of Rifo (Sällskapet Riksdagsledamöter och Forskare). Centrally, she is interested in how equality and ecology meet the built environment, with a specific focus on landscapes and urban space.

As an interdisciplinary scholar, Mack's research lies in the nexus between history, anthropology, and the environmental humanities. Her ongoing research interrogates the politics of modernist urban design and landscapes, using case studies from the numerous neighborhoods constructed in Sweden and Denmark from the 1950s to the 1970s. She is now preparing a monograph on that topic, with the working title, "Modernism's Hereafters: Reports from the Welfare City."

Mack’s book, The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and the Swedish City (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), received the Margaret Mead Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association. Offering a theory of "urban design from below," the book concerns how welfare-state architects and planners envisioned standardized housing and urban designs - including the town center (centrum) - during the so-called Million Program as a means to achieve social and economic equality. In this diasporic architectural history, Mack then investigates the exclusions experienced by Assyrian/Syriac (assyrier/syrianer) migrants who arrived to Sweden in the 1970s and 1980s. She analyzes how they have reinterpreted welfare-state urban space and, critically, constructed their own buildings and landscapes since that time, as well as how modern-day planners then grapple with questions of equality and inclusion.

Mack has edited Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects (Actar, 2019, with Roemer van Toorn and Sten Gromark) and Life Among Urban Planners: Practice, Professionalism, and Expertise in the Making of the City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020, with Michael Herzfeld). Two further volumes are forthcoming: The Combinatorial Imperative: Architectural Modularity in the 20th Century and the Question of “Difference” (TU Delft, with Pablo Miranda Carranza) and Nordic Welfare Landscapes for "The Good Life" (Aarhus University Press, with Ellen Braae, Ranja Hautamäki, and Mattias Qviström).

Mack's articles have appeared in a range of journals across various disciplines, including Architectural Histories, Public Culture, American Ethnologist, Environment and Planning D, International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Platform, and Landscape Research. She has also published work in numerous peer-reviewed edited volumes, such as Landscapes of Housing (ed. Jeanne Haffner, Routledge), Shopping Towns Europe (eds. Tom Avermaete and Janina Gosseye, Bloomsbury), Use Matters (ed. Kenny Cupers, Routledge), Architectural Affects after Deleuze and Guattari (eds. Marko Jobst and Hélène Frichot, Routledge), Re-Centring the City (eds. Jonathan Bach and Michał Murawski, UCL Press), Multiplicity (eds. Pari Riahi, Laure Katsaros, and Michael Davis, University of Massachusetts Press), Green Landscapes in the European City (eds. Peter Clark, Marjaana Niemi, and Catharina Nolin, Routledge), Nordic Models of Architecture and Welfare (eds. Thordis Arrhenius, Guttorm Ruud, and Ellen Braae, Birkhäuser), and more. She has also discussed her research in other venues, such as the SCAS Talks podcast: https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-4sp7t-15977f8?utm_campaign=w_share_ep&utm_medium=dlink&utm_source=w_share

Mack is a member of several international research networks, including the collective Aktion Arkiv (https://www.aktionarkiv.org), and is the co-founder of the EAHN interest group on Contemporary History. She serves on the editorial boards of Thresholds and Human Organization and is an Associate Editor of Housing, Theory and Society. She holds a PhD (Architecture, Urbanism, and Anthropology) from Harvard University and an MArch and MCP from MIT.

CURRENT RESEARCH:

Public Modernism: Reports from the Welfare City

[Pro Futura Scientia Fellowship, Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond]

This project analyzes the politics and ecologies of modernist mass housing, which is arguably the most significant and disparaged development in architecture and urban design of the past century. Early and mid-20th century welfare states typically paired social and economic programs with the construction of new neighborhoods: public initiatives in their financing, organization, and/or management and modernist in their designs. I label them “Welfare Cities” to signify their expansive visions of national progress, their use of architecture as a tool of social engineering, and their conception as utopian New Towns built from the ground up. The project follows two main trajectories: 1. To historicize and compare the construction and stigmatization of Welfare Cities and connect this to ongoing debates about modernism, segregation, renovation, privatization, demolition, and environmental change, and 2. To examine personal accounts of Welfare Cities among residents, designers, real estate developers, archivists, and more through fieldwork, interviews, and ethnographic readings of narratives about them in fiction, poetry, film, letters, songs, and beyond. I suggest alternatives to the longstanding dystopian assessments that have been prevalent since the 1970s.

Parks around the Towers: Landscape as Resource in the Urban Periphery from the Record Years to the Future

[Formas: "The Challenges and Opportunities of Urbanization"]

Reversing a famous functionalist formulation – from “towers in the park” to “parks around the towers” – this project studies the construction, use, and transformation of outdoor spaces created near multifamily housing during the Swedish Record Years (1961-1975), when 1.4 million dwelling units were built and discourses of nature emphasized the “rational.” Architects and planners involved are often asked to develop environmentally and socially sustainable solutions, but the green, open, and public spaces around the housing have typically not been the focus of these efforts. The project has two main aims: 1. To uncover how local residents have transformed landscapes since their construction, such as new ecosystems and unplanned spatial practices, and the role that social change has played. 2. To probe the shaping and reshaping of Record Year outdoor areas in original plans and in official renovations by architects and planners, and whose spatial interests are prioritized in the context of increased urbanization across intersectional questions of ethnic, national, and gender identity. By redefining late modernist landscapes – from background to foreground – this interdisciplinary study investigates open, green, and public spaces as critical components of urbanization: the spaces where public life and new social and environmental demands intersect.

COMPLETED RESEARCH:

BIG Faith: Migration and the History, Politics, and Architecture of Monumental Religious Buildings in Sweden, 2013-2015 [Vetenskapsrådet]

Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, 2013 [Forte]

"Architecture in Effect" Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2012

Harvard University Graduate Society Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2010-2011

P.E.O. Scholar Award Research Grant, 2009-2010

Harvard University Center for European Studies Research Grant, 2008-2009

American-Scandinavian Foundation Research Grant, 2008-2009

Harvard University Graduate Student Council Pre-Dissertation Research Grant, 2007

Harvard University Graduate Society Pre-Dissertation Research Grant, 2007

Project Grant (with C. Agdler and A. Lundstedt), 2002-2004[Konstnärsnämnden]

Mellon-MIT Inter-University Program on NGOs and Forced Migration Research Grant, 2002-2003

US Fulbright Program Research Grant to Sweden, 2000-2001