This paper addresses political conflict over the organisation of public services in Sweden at the turn of the century, c. 1900. It’s part of a research project where we analyse similar discussions from the mid-seventeenth to the late twentieth century (Hallenberg & Linnarsson, 2016). Our starting point is that the organisation of public services is a political as well as an economical problem.

In the paper we will demonstrate how the commercial restructuring of urban space challenged conservative notions of the common good as well as modern views of social reform and publicness. The modernization of public transport and telecommunications offered new possibilities for urban planning and extending the public sphere. The paper argues that political decisions played a vital role in shaping the management of public services. Discussions over who has the right to organise the common good has remained a leading trope in European history to this day, which makes it all the more important to see how political discourse on this subject have developed and changed over time.