ABSTRACT
Märta, in her sixties, is a long-time resident of the Swedish Million Programme, the welfare state’s housing initiative that produced one million units between 1965 and 1974, using late modernist, standardised designs for both housing and landscapes. Today, non-residents typically portray Million Programme neighbourhoods as spaces of lack, with rampant unemployment, segregation, and crime. For Märta and other residents, however, these images are unfamiliar. While traversing paths, parks, and squares over decades, Märta has reflected upon, written about, and changed these spaces. In these interstices, green affect has grown. In conversation with Märta, I alight upon this green affect: an affect that is green in its response to landscapes (and their renovation) and that is green by way of its organic, waxing-and-waning attentions and attachments. As affect, it lies beyond the personal, comprising bodily reactions and primordial responses. It seizes the moment, tears up the asphalt, and emanates from a place of potential. As a neighbour and a writer, a mother and a provocateur, Märta’s green affect blunts the ostensible shame of living in the Million Programme while exposing the pleasure. She invokes words to express it, yet it remains unruly. Green affect for the Million Programme is an assemblage, a recombinant collection that links and unlinks the beauty and the pain.
