<p>The thesis offers an interpretive account of the formation of a field of struggle relating to low-income housing in Toronto during the Depression. The stakes in the struggle are established by showing how rival authorities competed for influence over the definition of a housing problem and promoted new state projects of slum clearance, district redevelopment, public housing, and neighbourhood rehabilitation. A particular contribution of the research is to link interventions made to direct state development with the production and reproduction of spatially constituted social structures of Toronto. Through the reconstruction of the form and trajectory of a local housing market using oral histories, archived commentaries, photographic and quantitative sources, practices of housing provision are connected with patterns of service that contributed to class relations in the city.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The rights of tenants to the spaces that they are possessors of but do not hold titles to is contested in practice in large scale redevelopment projects. This thesis takes a look at two specific instances of urban district redevelopment and renewal in Malmö, Sweden: the slum clearance of Lugnet in the 1960s and the attempts to densify Holma in the present day. Using the concepts of the power of law, property and dispossession the thesis asks “how have the rights of tenants been taken into consideration?” This thesis finds that there is a great discrepancy between legal and philosophical constructs of property and ownership – that have been articulated in law well before the modern age – and the “dispossessory tendencies” prevalent in urban planning. It also finds that the codifying of tenant rights in the communicative model of planning has little relation to tenants rights as possessors – users – of their everyday spaces. These rights are challenged by ideas of the public good and the large scale of redevelopment projects. / Hyresgästers rättigheter till de platser som de besitter men inte innehar lagfarten till har i praktiken åsidosatts vid storskalig exploatering av bebyggda områden. Denna uppsats tittar närmare på två specifika fall av sådan exploatering, som berör hela stadsdelar i Malmö. Det första fallet är slumsaneringen av Lugnet i centrala Malmö på 1960-talet, och det andra är pågående försök att förtäta Holma i de södra delarna av Malmö. Utifrån begreppen makt, egendom och besittningsrätt ställs frågan “hur har hyresgästers rättigheter beaktats i dessa situationer?” Uppsatsen finner att det finns en stor diskrepans mellan de juridiska och filosofiska sätten att tänka kring egendom och ägandeskap – så som de har uttryckts i lag långt innan den moderna tidsåldern – och de bortträngande tendenserna som är inneboende i stadsplanering. I uppsatsen framkommer det också att fastställandet av hyresgästers rättigheter i planeringens kommunikativa process har liten koppling till hyresgästers rättigheter som besittare – dvs. brukare – av sina vardagsplatser. Dessa rättigheter utmanas av idéer om det allmännas bästa och storskaligheten på nybyggnationen.