In 1985, when I was four months old, my family moved from Kiruna to Luleå, a city in northern Sweden. My father had found a job with the Swedish State Railways, and we were given a firsthand rental contract for a four-room apartment in Hertsön, one of the city’s largest housing estates. Hertsön had been built as part of Sweden’s massive public housing program of the 1960s and ’70s. But there was another reason for its construction. It was meant to house workers for a vast new industrial project: Steelworks 80 (Stålverk 80).

Steelworks 80 was conceived in the early 1970s by Sweden’s Social Democratic government as an expansion of the country’s steel industry. It was supposed to transform the economy of northern Sweden, create thousands of jobs, and reverse decades of depopulation. Instead, in 1976, the project was abandoned in the middle of one of the deepest crises in the global steel industry of the twentieth century.

My family, therefore, moved into a neighborhood built for a future that had already disappeared. My father once described our situation with a phrase that has stayed with me: we live in the aftermath of what never happened. That sentence captures something about capitalism that goes beyond the history of one Swedish city.