Jennifer Mack

Jennifer Mack is Docent and Associate Professor at KTH. She is also a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (2022-2027), where she is in residence during the Fall 2026 term. Mack is an elected member of The Young Academy of Sweden (2024-2029), a board member of Rifo (Sällskapet Riksdagsledamöter och Forskare), and a board member of the Swedish Anthropological Association (SANT). As an interdisciplinary scholar, Mack's research lies in the nexus between history of the built environment, social anthropology, and the environmental humanities.

Mack's ongoing research interrogates the stigmatization, renovation, and demolition of Swedish and Danish mass housing and landscapes from the 1960s to the present. These projects - typically built in the modernist style and concrete - have been targets of evolving political ambitions. Understood as progressive "welfare cities" in the postwar period, they are today subject to regressive plans that portray them as "parallel societies" or even "ghettos." Her monograph on this topic, Modernism's Hereafters: Reports from the Welfare City, is forthcoming (University of Texas Press, 2027).

Mack’s first 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," it concerns how Swedish welfare-state-era and current planners have privileged standardization in their efforts to achieve social equality, and how migrant Assyrian Syriacs (assyrier/syrianer) questioned this approach while also constructing their own buildings and landscapes.

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 and Difference in the 20th Century(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 journals like Architectural Histories, Public Culture, Journal of Modern European History, American Ethnologist, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Platform, and Landscape Research. She has also published in numerous peer-reviewed edited volumes on topics from the consumerism in a Swedish town center to the standardization of welfare landscapes to new Swedish mosques to the geographies of allotment gardens.

Mack is a member of several international research networks, including the collective Aktion Arkiv (https://www.aktionarkiv.org), and she 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:

Utopia 2.0: "Nature-Thinking" in the Nordic New Towns of the Past, Present, and Future

[The Swedish Research Council, Vetenskapsrådet]

Public Modernism: Reports from the Welfare City

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