Lina Olsson

• Senior Lecturer
• lina.olsson@mau.se

PhD in Architecture, MSc in Spatial Planning

Senior Lecturer at the Department of Urban Studies.

My research and teaching focuses on issues related to urban planning, urban spatial policies and spatial power relations, in particular property relations, at various geographical levels.

My current research deals with the role of governmental strategies, municipal strategies in particular, in providing spaces for private sector investments, on one hand by means of planning, on the other by means of public property development. These strategies apply to different logics of spatial power, and the aim of my research is to scrutinize their social, spatial and ideological implications.

In my previous research, which is published in my doctoral thesis The Self-Organized City (2008) (Swe: Den självorganiserade staden: appropriation av offentliga rum i Rinkeby), I have conducted theoretical and empirical studies of appropriation processes and spatial power relations related to cultural identity. The overarching purpose of my doctoral thesis has been to study the reshaping of urban spaces by means of self-organization. By taking departure in theories on spatial appropriation processes by Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau among others, I have formulated a set of appropriation concepts that are used as analytical tools for the study of two cases, both located in Rinkeby, an area on the social and geographical margin of Stockholm. The case studies are firstly built on the analysis of self-organized strategies aiming at making cultural identities visible in the public space and secondly on the analysis of the relations between appropriation processes and spatial power structures.

Lina Olsson