This paper investigates the dialectics between urban planning, economic crisis and the build environment by looking at how the city of Malmö (Sweden) has responded to two different crises. First, the so-called industrial crisis was met with more industrial policies that exacerbated the problems and led the city into a severe crisis in the early 1990s. Then Malmö inverted its strategy and embraced the ‘post-industrial city’. Nowadays, as the 2008 crisis has not seemed to have disappeared and the current economic situation is ‘uncertain’, the official rhetoric in Malmö is seemingly as optimistic as ever, as a new congress/concert hall, new shopping centres and new hotels are being built: the production of the post-industrial city continues with full force. By investigating the city-crisis dialectics and discussing theories on crisis and crisis management, inspired by Marx, Schumpeter and Keynes, this paper asks the question as to whether Malmö today is making a similar mistake as in the 1980s, that is, reproducing yesterday's city.