A Seamless City : female textile workers in the urban fabric of Malmö

Abstract: This thesis examines how the historical presence of female textile industry workers can be envisaged in the urban landscape of Malmö. With the background of Malmö’s urban history and transformation from an industrial town to a “City of Knowledge”, and an autoethnographic method based on a framework of Critical Normativity, two case studies are performed. The first one is on the stockings factory Malmö Strumpfabrik AB and the second on the chocolate factory Marabouparken in Sundbyberg. Women have played a major role in building the city of Malmö, but it remains coded in masculine terms. The city is dominated by the large-scale structures surrounding the docks, the extensive roads connecting these workplaces to the suburbs and thus the workers’ residences, as well as a grey industrial landscape that lies just around the bend from most of the residential areas in the city. At first glance Malmö is not a city characterised by the presence of a female workforce. Taking part of the heritage of their historical presence in the environments where they operated is a challenge today, as these have effectively been hidden by commerce and large parking lots. Nonetheless, the role women played in building the fortune that was necessary for the city to become what it is today, cannot be overemphasized. Urban planning for the self-proclaimed “City of Knowledge” ought to affirm this. This paper seeks to envisage the potential of Malmö Strumpfabrik AB and the possibility of making the history of the female textile workers present in the urban fabric of the city today. The narrative and history of Strumpan and Marabou, the materiality of their present and historical conditions, and my own walking through this, figuratively and factually, exposes a potential in recognising the history of the female textile workers of Malmö through integrating Malmö Strumpfabrik AB in the present urban fabric. Using a corresponding and prestigious site of a female dominated industrial workplace enables an envisaging of how Malmö can materialise this significant history of its textile legacy. The autoethnographic method and the framework of critical normativity open an array of potentials for understanding how the vernacular landscape manifests in the lives of the inhabitants. Further research into how critical normativity can be utilised in envisaging the heterogenic urban landscape of Malmö is necessary, both from a historical and contemporary perspective.