Realizing Malmö’s Neighborhood Functionality and Social Capital Potential The Impacts of High-Speed Transport Infrastructure on Rosengård and Fosie

Increasingly, urban and suburban areas in many western cities are shaped by the tides of high-speed flows of people and goods. While an integral piece of our socio-economic fabric high-speed transport infrastructure (HSTI), limited in this paper to urban road networks, facilitates high-speed vehicle movement at the expense of neighborhood social interaction. A largely mono-functional land use, HSTI occupies large amounts of land dedicated to movement space and spreads out housing, recreational areas, commercial space, and other land uses. The wider space between residential, commercial, and recreational areas increases the distance and time residents must move, which can reduce overall formal and informal socializing among neighbors as well as limit neighborhood functionality. In addition, HSTI imposes "wall" and zone-of-influence effects over neighborhood interactive social exchange space (ISES). While ISES facilitates social exchange and interaction among neighborhood residents and businesses, HSTI increases safety concerns and limits the use and effectiveness of this multi-functional space. By imposing its various effects and reducing the liveliness and continuity of ISES, HSTI limits the development of neighborhood, and especially "bridging" social capital. Interactive social exchange space, especially for lower-income groups, is an important building block of "bonding" and "bridging" social capital. This thesis presents a case study of Rosengård and Fosie, two large neighborhood areas in Malmö, Sweden that are interwoven with HSTI and have indicators of social capital decline. While there are many factors that contribute to Rosengård’s and Fosie’s socio-economic conditions, this paper will present theoretical and empirical evidence that HSTI disrupts and to some extent degrades their neighborhood functionality and stocks of social capital. Through use of traffic calming and creative transport initiatives, Malmö Stad and these neighborhoods may mitigate the negative impacts of HSTI by transforming HSTI from mono-functional movement corridors to a layered social and movement space.