How do we house our welfare? This is the core question motivating an ongoing research project which engages with the last decade’s tendency of municipal sales of care, education and childcare buildings to private actors. The purpose is to conceptually develop economic and urban geographical perspectives on privatization and re-municipalization with the theoretical lenses of municipal governance and social reproduction and to contribute to the geographic research field with novel knowledge on the public ownership of property and the privatization thereof. The project aims to examine privatization, re-municipalization and municipal governance of community service properties in Sweden during the period 2013-2025. Community service properties are defined (by MSCI) as buildings that are used for publicly financed operations and services – such as schools, care homes, cultural buildings, prisons, and city halls. This presentation will present our current work with data collection that will form the basis for a transaction and geographical analyses. These investigations aim to study the privatization and re-municipalization of community service properties and to explore the geographies of these transactions. We seek to respond to the following research questions: How have privatization and re municipalization of community service properties developed, who have been the private actors buying and/or selling and what type of services are affected, what type of municipalities, and when, have sold and bought community service properties, and how are transactions linked to municipalities’ financial performance figures over time?
Jennie Gustafsson is a political-economic geographer with an interest in rental housing and real estate, welfare, municipal governance, and housing inequality. She has previously researched institutional investments in rental housing, the effect of residential property investments in local rental markets beyond larger cities, and the municipal governance of international property investors. She is currently running two research projects, financed by Formas and Vetenskapsrådet, investigating the privatization and re-municipalization of community properties in Sweden, focusing on how properties housing welfare services is owned by institutional investors.
