Remaking the People’s Park: Heritage Renewal Troubled by Past Political Struggles?

Abstract

This article explores how a series of heritage-driven renewal plans in the Swedish city Malmö dealt with a landscape deeply shaped by radical politics: Malmö People's Park (Folkets Park). Arguing against notions of heritage where the past is essentially considered a malleable resource for present commercial or political concerns, we scrutinise plans for the People's Park from the 1980s onward to emphasise how even within renewal attempts built on seemingly uncontroversial nostalgic readings of the park's past, tensions proved impossible to keep at bay. This had profound effects on the studied development process. Established by the city's social-democratic labour movement in 1891, the People's Park is both enmeshed with historical narratives, and full of material artefacts left by a century when the Social Democrats had a decisive presence in the city. As municipal planners and politicians targeted this piece of land, the tensions they had to navigate included not only what present ideas to bring to bear on the making of heritage, but also how to deal with past politics and the park as a material landscape. Our findings point to how the kinds of labour politics that had faded for decades became impossible to dismiss in urban renewal. Both political representations and de-politicising nostalgic representations of Malmö People's Park's past provoked (often unexpected) resistance undoing planning visions.

“The People’s Park is bigger, more freely located, more beautiful and – Our own park”: Workers, parks, and the spaces of class struggle in turn of the century Norrköping, Sweden

“…Indeed, merely maintaining ownership of the land initially proved challenging. In 1903, parts of the property would have been sold were it not for a 3,500 kronor loan from the local People’s House, underscoring how various labour movement facilities supported each other financially (Pries and Jönsson, 2019). Just over a decade later, it was instead the People’s Park that was in a position to issue loans to other labour-controlled organisation, buy shares in the People’s House, and help finance the Social Democrats’ election fund (Norrköping Folkets Park, 1905, 1916, 1919, 1920, 1941).…”

“…During the last decades of the 19th century, urban parks nicknamed folkparker were established or planned in several bigger Swedish cities. Meanwhile, Norrköping’s People’s Park was preceded by a dozen similar parks throughout Sweden, with the first established in Malmö a decade earlier (Pries et al, 2020; Pries and Jönsson, 2019). Initially, these parks provided an answer to the “logistical dilemma of finding suitable places in which to gather” (Pries et al, 2020) during an era when labour organisers were frequently barred from public space and shop-floors, and found it difficult to rent other venues (Ståhl, 2005).…”

A very Nordic set of concerns?

“…Against this backdrop of urban fragmentation, recent work also interrogates the possibilities for urban conviviality. Gressgård and Jensen (2016) examine Nordic urban planning to support ethnic pluralism, while various scholars explore particular settings that either facilitate cross-ethnic cohesion or highlight inter-ethnic friction, from parks and other public spaces (Jacob & Hellström, 2010;Kuurne & Gómez, 2019;Lapiņa, 2016;Mouratidis & Poortinga, 2020;Pries & Jönsson, 2019;Simonsen et al, 2017;Stanfield & van Riemsdijk, 2019;Thörn, 2012;Trandberg Jensen & Jensen, forthcoming), to schools (Sernhede, 2018), to friendship networks and moments of urban mobilization (Andersen, 2019;Hansen, 2020;Keskinen et al, 2019;Merrill & Pries, 2019). One particular district of Copenhagen has received extensive scholarly attention: the "freetown" of Christiania was established in the 1970s by activists seeking a space "autonomous" from overweening state regulation, but has been subjected over the last 20 years to various attempts at "normalization", which have been studied for their impacts on equity, surveillance, and integration (Amouroux, 2009;Coppola & Vanolo, 2015;Jarvis, 2013;Ntounis & Kanellopoulou, 2017;Rannila & Repo, 2018;Winter, 2016).…”