A popular public sphere: uncovering the making and memories The Swedish People’s Parks

Summary, in Swedish

The public sphere is a key geographic dimension of struggles for democracy, and democratic life more broadly. Yet, the notion of a public sphere is often treated as a spatial metaphor for diffuse conversations. Drawing on critical geographies of social movements as makers of public places, we in this paper turn to the case of the early Swedish labor movements’ several hundred so-called People’s Parks. We propose that these parks were created as what might, drawing on Margaret Kohn, be understood as a “popular public sphere”. These public places proved, we suggest, key to Swedish social democracy’s decades-long contestation of hegemony. Unlike many other powerful spaces of political struggle forged in the same period, these places where not crushed by repression. Instead, they appear to have been used as one of the models for how the welfare state sought to generate an even more ambitious set of public institutions from the top down. Gradually undermined by social democracy’s turn to state-funded public meeting places, this popular public sphere slowly fell into disarray. With this paper, we propose that uncovering the history of the People’s Parks as popular publics prefiguring the welfare state might be an important way to make sense of the memory politics of what today still is a movement infrastructure, yet remains unmoored from both democratic and social political ambitions.

• Författare: Johan Pries; Erik Jönsson
• Avdelning/ar: Institutionen för kulturgeografi och ekonomisk geografi
• Publiceringsår: 2024-06-27
• Språk: Engelska
• Länkar: https://ngm2024.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/NGM_Book_of_Abstracts_Final_New.pdf
• Dokumenttyp: Konferensbidrag: abstract
• Ämne: Economic Geography
• Conference name: Nordic Geographers Meeting 2024 in Copenhagen
• Conference date: 2024-06-24 - 2024-06-27
• Conference place: Köpenhamn, Denmark
• Aktiv: Published