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), and an elected member of The Young Academy of Sweden (2024-2029). Broadly, her work links history, anthropology, and the environmental humanities to investigate the built environment, with projects currently focused on toxicity, populism, climate change, and uncertainty in relation to landscapes and housing. A central armature of her ongoing research interrogates the politics of architecture and landscapes, using case studies from the numerous modernist neighborhoods constructed in Sweden and Denmark from the 1950s to the 1970s.

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. She has co-edited the anthologies Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects (Actar, 2019) and Life Among Urban Planners: Practice, Professionalism, and Expertise in the Making of the City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). She has also published widely in edited volumes and in a range of journals, including Architectural Histories, Public Culture, American Ethnologist, International Journal of Islamic Architecture, and Landscape Research. 

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.

CURRENT RESEARCH:

Public Modernism: Reports from the Welfare City

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

This project offers new methodological approaches and produces new paradigms for analyzing what is arguably the most significant and disparaged development in architecture and urban design of the past century – modernism – as used in housing projects across Europe. 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, and demolition, and 2. To examine residents’ experiences of Welfare Cities through fieldwork, interviews, and ethnographic readings of narratives about them in fiction, poetry, film, letters, songs, and beyond. These investigations 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