Company Towns and Workers’ Housing in Modern Sweden

A study of industrial architecture and social space in the 20th-century welfare project.

“Live right the Cloetta way” – Elisa López’s research focused on 20th-century industrial communities, with particular emphasis on the role of architects in designing housing. The study also explored landscape planning and social infrastructure such as schools and childcare facilities, often commissioned by successful industrial companies like Cloetta, Storvik, and LKAB.

Elisa López is an anthropologist who earned her PhD from Uppsala University in 2021. Through her investigations in the ArkDes collection, she contributed to a deeper understanding of how company towns were established across Sweden throughout the 20th century. Her research highlights the role these towns played in the development of the Swedish welfare state—an issue also addressed in the 2020 ArkDes exhibition Kiruna Forever.

The ArkDes collection includes materials from both well-known architects such as Ralph Erskine—who designed workers’ housing in Jädraås—and lesser-known figures such as Henry Fraenkel, whose work for Cloetta in Ljungsbro, Linköping, was a key part of the study.

One of the findings shows how good architecture increasingly came to be viewed as a tool for producing “good workers” from the 1910s onward. The built environments of company towns reflect the social relations of production—both in continuity and in transformation. The architectural expertise developed in these Swedish contexts was later exported internationally, for example in the design of the mining town of Yekepa in Liberia.