The purpose of this project was to examine the intersections between two of 20th century Sweden’s most foundational societal projects: the folkhem and mass motoring (automobility). Of particular interest was the hypothesized tension between the collectivism of the folkhem and the individualism of automobility, and how politicians and planners negotiated this tension during the expansion of both the folkhem and the country’s automobile system.

The empirical work soon showed that the initial hypothesis was too simplistic. The dichotomy of the collectivistic folkhem and individualistic automobility, while accurate on some levels, begins to break down upon closer investigation. This is because both the folkhem and automobility have characteristics that embody both collectivism and individualism.

One of the interesting developments during the research process was in fact the lack of discussion of any tension between the goals of the folkhem and the needs of automobility. On occasion, a politician or newspaper commentator would argue that prioritizing automobility over more collective forms of transportation was problematic from the perspective of larger political or social values, but such fears were relatively few over the course of the middle of the twentieth century, at least judging from the empirical material collected in this study.

Empirically, the study involved reviewing debates from the Swedish parliament primarily from the first half of the 20th century. Newspaper articles were also studied, as were Statens Offentliga Utredningar (SOU) reports related to mass motoring.

The first publication is an article in the journal Political Geography entitled “Deadly exceptionalisms.” Given that automobility in Sweden has been described as a case of the “Americanization” of Sweden, the purpose of this article is to compare in broad terms the aspects of each country that are considered to contribute to its understanding as “exceptional” in some way. For the US, exceptionalism is based primarily on the idea of the American people as exceptional individuals, and also on the exceptional role of the American state in promoting freedom around the world. In contrast, Swedish exceptionalism tends to be associated with the achievements of the welfare state and the folkhem, demonstrating the effectiveness of collective action through government policies. In the Swedish case, there is also a tradition of “technocracy,” of considering social problems to be amenable to solving through technical-administrative measures. The potential weaknesses and blind spots of the assumptions of exceptionalism in the US and Sweden are discussed in this article. The issue of technocratic solutions in Sweden may help explain the institutional support for automobility as well as the inability to foresee and mitigate some of the more serious detrimental consequences of automobility.

The next product from the project is an article that is currently under review at an international journal. The purpose of this piece is to introduce a new way of conceptualizing the folkhem, one that facilitates its connections to automobility. This analysis is based on a review of the historical literature on the folkhem. One of the things that becomes clear when surveying this literature through the lens of the concepts of individualism and collectivism is that, rather than the question being one of a tension between a collectivist folkhem and individualist automobile system, the question is more one of a tension between collectivism and individualism in both the folkhem and automobility. Both processes involve individualist and collectivist aspects simultaneously.

The article argues that we can consider the folkhem to be an overall project that consists of five smaller projects, which are: 1) an ideological project (promoting equality, solidarity and collectivism); 2) a state-building project (the creation of a strong welfare state); 3) an economic project (ensuring prosperity for all and economic security against the disruption caused by industrialization); 4) a social project (freeing individuals from dependence on the family and other social bonds); and 5) a nationalist project (an attempt to create a modern (and gendered) Swedish nationality, as imagined by experts and technocrats).

The article demonstrates the value of this way of conceptualizing the folkhem by addressing the ways in which automobility intersects and complements the folkhem through these five projects. In addition, the article compares Swedish automobility with American automobility in the context of the psychological processes that supported the embracing of automobility in the US. The article argues that in Sweden, one way in which automobility facilitated the development of a strong, centralized welfare state was through offering a psychological/emotional outlet for a feeling of individual control and power. The command one experiences over one’s individual travel when operating an automobile may have served as an important release valve for those Swedes (not necessarily a majority) who felt uncomfortable with the close relationship the state was developing with individual citizens.

The next product of the project is a manuscript that is being prepared for submission to an international journal. This article has as its point of departure the term “car terrorism” (in Swedish, “bilterror”), which exploded on to the Swedish scene in the early 1920s. Suddenly the Swedish newspapers were filled with discussions of “car terrorism” and “car terrorists”, and the term was even used by Swedish politicians in the debates in the Swedish parliament. The use of the term “car terrorism” is unique to Sweden, I was not able to find this term in the historical newspapers in the US or UK (for example). This article reviews the different meanings of the term as used by different actors in the Swedish debate, and traces its rise and decline from the 1920s through the 1940s.

One of the most intriguing findings of this article is that the term “bilterror” seemed to identify certain problems with the growth of automobility in Swedish cities that could only be solved through a comprehensive effort that mirrored the programs introduced through the folkhem era (the 1920s being shortly before the folkhem project was truly launched). The solution to the dangers created by this particular individualistic form of transportation involved, among other things, the promotion of a “traffic culture” (“trafikkultur” in Swedish), a collective effort to orient all users of public space (drivers, cyclists, pedestrians, public transit users) in the new sociospatial realities created by the imposition of automobility in the urban landscape. The debate about the need for a new traffic culture foreshadowed both the introduction of the folkhem in the ways in which it conceived of the relationship between the individual and the collective, and the promotion of the “car society” (“bilsamhället”), the latter being the post-war solution of facilitating the hegemony of the automobile system as a way to solve the problems identified by the use of the term car terrorism.

The fourth product of the project is a chapter in a forthcoming edited volume that jumps forward to consider the future of automobility in the era of climate change. This era is sometimes called the Anthropocene, and this chapter considers the relationship between the folkhem and automobility from the perspective of the Anthropocene, and specifically, the ability of the institutions created through the folkhem to “tame” automobility such that its climate impact is much reduced. The idea of the “green folkhem” is discussed here. The legacy of the folkhem hinders the ability of Swedish society to rein in automobility and address climate change in that a fundamental element of the folkhem was a compromise with capitalism, one that sought to protect Swedish citizens from the vagaries of the capitalist economy in return for advancing the interests of capitalist firms.

It is difficult to identify three most important results of this project at this early stage. I would at this point argue that one of these is the way of conceptualizing the folkhem as consisting of five distinct but overlapping projects, as this allows us to see connections to other aspects of society in Sweden that would be harder to see otherwise.

A second important result is the extent to which the clash between automobility and urban society in Sweden generated unique problems that needed unique solutions that foreshadowed the kinds of collective engagement that characterized the coming folkhem.

A third important result is the ways in which the folkhem has produced structural and institutional obstacles in the way of minimizing the environmental impacts of automobility. Given the global interest in reducing the destructiveness of the Anthropocene, an awareness of these obstacles can be of considerable importance.

One new research question generated by this project is the question of the role of automobility in the evolution of the discourse on freedom of choice (“valfrihet”) in Sweden – the ways in which the folkhem and automobility intersected to influence the understanding of valfrihet should be studied in the future.

The project’s international dimensions include publications in international venues (journals and books), as well as presentations at international conferences.

The findings of this study have been presented at four national and international conferences (Nordic Geographers Meeting (2 times), Political Geography Specialty Group (of the Association of American Geographers) Pre-Conference in the US, and the Swedish-American Borderlands conference in Uppsala), as well as to the geography departments at the Universities of Oulu in Finland and Oslo in Norway during visits to those universities.

I have discussed the findings of the project on Swedish radio (Vetenskapsradion Forum and Röör i P4), and in newspaper articles marking a century of Swedish automobility.