The explosion of youth revolts in the long 1970s, including the emergence of environmental activism in western Europe, coincided with the democratization of printing technologies, and led to radical transformation in the production and distribution of knowledge. Publishing became cheap and easy due to the appearance of portable versions of formerly costly and heavy printing machinery and a myriad of self-published zines with an environmentalist tone flourished, disseminating a firm rejection to the post-war consensus of consumerism and growth, denouncing the overarching planning organizations, policies, and strategies. Besides criticism, they also present ways of thinking, living, cooperating, and building that follow different rules and values than consumer capitalism. This contribution identifies a gap in European planning history related to the agency of 1970s' environmental activism and explores the potential of environmentalist zines as sources to sustain historical inquiry and help to fill that gap. It proposes conceptualizing zines as 'minor' sources, arguing that the Deleuzian-Guattarian category is a useful concept for reframing previously marginalized voices in planning history. Through the analysis of seven transnationally published zines, the paper demonstrates their validity as sources that document contributions of voices that have been neglected so far.

Taking the first ecological urban development built in Stockholm as case study, the comunication exposes how the collapse and transformation on the Swedish welfare state period with its following housing deregulation allowed the appareance of an alternative and emancipative inhabitation model, independent both from the market and the public protection. It is focused first on the production process of the district by analizying the network of actors involved on Understenshöjden cooperative and secondly, it analyzes the produced architectonic object.

The housing exhibition Bo01, also known as the City of Tomorrow, was held in Västra Hamnen in Malmö, Sweden, from May to August 2001. Aiming to be a model for an ecologically sustainable urban development, the exhibition mobilized an unprecedented number of public resources and initiated a series of collaborations between Swedish research and manufacturing industries to design experimental solutions for ‘future’ sustainable dwellings. A completely new district with 800 apartments, a landscape display, and an art exhibition was built for Bo01 within two years. A few days before closing, Bo01 AB, a subsidiary of the City of Malmö, filed for bankruptcy. Drawing on the critical approach to sustainability developed by urban political ecology, this paper examines the housing exhibition itself, the ethics suggested by techno-managerial sustainability practices, and the shift towards municipal entrepreneurialism in the late 1990s.