The Construction of a Suburb: Ideology, Architecture and Everyday Culture in Skjettenbyen

Countering both sprawling suburbia and suburban high-rise estates, planners and architects in the early 1970s developed other ways of making more human friendly, denser and participatory dwelling areas outside cities. Skjettenbyen outside Oslo is such an example. This paper presents an investigation of the ideological foundation for the construction of this large estate, how architecture was produced and represented as part of such an ideology, and how this relates to suburban culture and sense of place. Architects and planners tend to have great expectations of the social implications of their plans. Skjettenbyen is no exception: its planning, and the discursive context of the epoch, created a regime not only for the design and building of the area, but also for creating a social milieu and establishing a culture that the architects themselves would be a part of. Skjettenbyen is marked by the cultural political economy of the welfare state aiming at providing the working and lower middle-class places to live and belong. However, this investigation revealed a mundane pragmatism amongst its inhabitants, far from the counter culture represented by progressive architects. The meaning of Skjettenbyen and the everyday sense of place revealed in this study is the kind that develops over time when people build social capital. However, the planning layout, architectural form and practice-structure relations coming from the progressive discourse, as for example interior design and car parking, may still frame people's practices and place specific suburban culture in ways that make it different from suburbia elsewhere. As such this analysis contributes to the nuanced discussion of how planning influences people's suburban experiences.