The co-operative housing 'fix' : a case study on an emerging co-operative housing sector in Helsinki, Finland

Sammanfattning: This thesis contributes to growing critical scholarship investigating co-operative housing projects in relation to their wider socio-political and institutional contexts. It goes beyond normative questions of whether co-operative housing projects are sustainable, or not. Instead, it proposes to utilize an empirical case study on an emerging co-operative housing sector in Finland, as a tool to problematize - and re-politicize – the relationship between eco-modernist urban sustainability discourse and strategic reforms in advanced liberal urban governance. As co-operative housing models become increasingly integrated into the urban sustainability agendas of various actors - from activists, to researchers and governmental institutions - it becomes pertinent to ask the critical questions on how and why they are receiving such support. In investigating these questions, the interactions between different actors will be discussed in relation to their broader theoretical and material contexts. Such a relational approach helps in understanding whether the co-operatives can reveal, or even contribute to, the development of a sustainability ‘fix’ in Helsinki, Finland. This ‘fix’ employs eco-modernist logics of ‘efficiency’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘consensus’ in order to re-engineer the role and reach of State and municipal governments. Through elucidating theories of ‘green’ governmentality, urban land rent, and post-politics it explores how power/knowledge works operationally (through discourse, technologies, and practices) to normalize dominant ‘truths’ on ecologically modernizing transformations in urban governance. There is limited scholarship linking co-operatives to their wider politico-institutional contexts, particularly from an urban political ecology lens. This is troubling, as our framings of ‘nature’ and ‘sustainability’ are inextricably interwoven with dominant politico-ideological systems and ideologies - which means they can be used as tools, or weapons, to shape how we think about the relationship between topics of land rent, citizenship, and urban governance. This has a direct implication on the responsibilities and motives of different actors in justifying their support for, or challenges against, co-operative housing alternatives.