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 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.

Mack's ongoing research interrogates demolitions, renovations, and stigmatization in Swedish and Danish mass housing and landscapes from the 1960s to the present. These projects - typically built in the modernist style and largely using concrete and standardized landscape architecture - have been targets of evolving political ambitions. They were understood as progressive "welfare cities" in the postwar period but 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 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 employed standardized designs to achieve social equality. In this diasporic architectural history, Mack then investigates the exclusions experienced by Assyrian/Syriac (assyrier/syrianer) migrants who began arriving to Sweden in the 1970s and 1980s. She analyzes how they reinterpreted welfare-state spaces and, critically, constructed their own buildings and landscapes, as well as how modern-day planners have grappled 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: Society and Space, the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Platform, and Landscape Research, and she has 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]

Utopia 2.0 historicizes, questions, and updates approaches to ecological community planning through close historical and ethnographic studies of three utopian planning models with origins in the Nordic countries. All three espouse variations of what I label “nature-thinking." The subprojects include 1. technocratic nature-thinking in welfare suburbs (mid-20th c.), using modular green spaces to promote social equality (Mack), 2. conservationist nature-thinking in ecovillages (late 20th c. to the present) that emphasized human and environmental well-being (led by PhD student Alejandra Navarrete Llopis), and 3. extractive nature-thinking in industrial Arctic towns (21st c.), advancing neoliberal visions of "greening" (led by postdoctoral research Elisa Maria López). The team develops case studies from Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and beyond, arguing that the long history of utopian, nature-oriented Nordic planning makes the region a key site for study and comparison. Analyzing the histories and transformations of three utopian planning models where nature and communities were intended to develop together, we understand them both critically and as radically inventive for their times. Innovative interdisciplinary methods link ethnography and history to compare, critique, and analyze planners, plans, plants, ore, and more. How did past designers understand their own nature-thinking, and what can their contemporary counterparts glean from such approaches? How has nature “talked back” to past utopian plans, and what lessons do those dialogues between humans and nonhuman species provide?

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.