New book out!

A hobby project of mine has now resulted in a two-volume work published by Brill, in the series Library of the Written Word.

Title: Swedish Dissertations and their Subjects, 1600-1820: An Annotated Catalogue

From the publishers website: This book challenges earlier understandings of early modern dissertations as unimaginative academic exercises. It argues for their continuous importance in scholarly and scientific discourse, and describes the richness and diversity of their subjects and themes. The book contains a complete catalogue of the almost 20,000 Swedish dissertations defended in Uppsala, Lund and Åbo, 1600 to 1820. The catalogue includes longer comments and descriptions of a few thousand of these dissertations, and also gives an analysis of how different subjects have evolved over time.

Sweden's first dissertation in architecture

Architectura aedium sacrarum, presided over by Anders Riddermarck and defended on Feburary 5 in 1695 by Jonas Norck, is most probably Sweden’s first dissertation in architecture. More sepcifically, it deals with the architecture of sacred buildings. It brings up everything from the structure and materials of buidlings to architectural decorations and the five orders of classical columns.

Temporality, nationalism and the territorialisation of public space - Commemorational presences in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv

New article out in Political Geography here

Abstract: In this article, I investigate how material strategies of commemoration are part of the recategorisation of public space in a series of nationalistic projects in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. I look especially at the different ways in which these commemorative territories are made present, and the specific view of history that these presences entail. The studied cases include for example the transformation of a public square into a ‘memorial square’ (Rabin Square), of a religious space into a ‘space of national significance’ (Western Wall Plaza), and of part of an urban district into a ‘archaeological excavation’ and a ‘tourist theme park’ (City of David). In the article, I trace and conceptualise five temporal modalities (or temporal perspectives) and discuss their related material designs. Finally, I discuss how studying these modalities can be fertile for exploring how memorials play a part in producing and stabilising different kinds of nationalist affects and sentiments.

Western Wall, Jerusalem, 1905 (Source: Marinmuseet, Karlskrona)

Meeting places of the Univer-city: On serendipitous encounters in a growing university area

New article in Social Sciences & Humanities Open, written together with Fredrik Torisson.

Abstract: In this paper we investigate the ways in which a university, taking on the scale of a city of its own, affords meetings for researchers and teachers between disciplines. How does the continuous transformation and expansion of the university's physical environment affect the everyday lives and serendipitous encounters of the researchers active within it? The aim of the paper is to develop a conceptualization to facilitate discussions and analyses of urban transformations and its relation to serendipitous and informal meetings in urban areas. The paper takes Lund University as a case and uses different methods, such as time-geographical notations and Perec-inspired observations studies, to develop five different aspects that allow us to take measure of urban configurations and their potential for serendipitous meetings and encounters.

Territorial mimetics and room types: The spatial development of Swedish district courthouses 1970-2020

A not so new article, out in 2023:

ABSTRACT

In this article I investigate the spatial development of the Swedish district courthouse and its different room types from 1970 to 2020, with attention to its specificities and its commonalities with other building types. How have spatial form and use travel between building types during this period, and how has this contributed to the recent, quite radical developments and transformation of the courthouse as a building type? In the article, I especially focus on aspects relating the architectural and spatial culture of citation, and on what I here will call territorial mimetics. Based on a mixed-method approach, the study, traces and discusses five spatial themes of typological change within district courthouses, trends that also can be seen as a part of deeper spatial and mimetic tendencies circulating the Swedish society during these decades. In the conclusion, I then discuss the specific mimetic style of the courthouse as characterised by an ongoing negotiation between type-specific rules and cross-type models.

Online seminar: Researching territories

Urban crystallization and the morphogenesis of urban territories

New article written together with Andrea Mubi Brighenti is out now on Territory, Politics and Governence

ABSTRACT

In this article, we develop the perspective of crystallization as a way to shed a light on the morphogenesis and stabilization of urban territories. We start by describing crystallization as a consolidation of a visible and singular order that establishes certain privileged directions of growth and breaks spatial and temporal symmetries. We then illuminate how crystallization processes unfold at different scales, going through a series of historical cases, from the stabilization of urban regions, to iconic places such as Times Square, New York, and on to large scale linear or path crystals, such the Turia Riverbed Park in Valencia. Building on these cases, we then discuss crystallization as a phenomenon requiring metastability, and how this metastability relates to different ways and forms of territorial stabilization. Finally, we discuss how crystallization, by making certain figures and directions more salient than others, also plays an important part in the emergence of new scales and in the processes of urban rescaling, that is, how crystallization also contributes to a hierarchical segmentation of the urban environment.

From Bruno Taut, Die Stadtkrone (1919)

Geomedia

In April, I will talk in Karlstad on a mini-symposium on geomedia

Retail talk

On February 5th, I will give a talk on retail and urban space at Umeå University.

Animated Lands

Our book on Nebraska University Press is out now:

https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496213396/

The Life and Death of Residential Room Types: A Study of Swedish Building Plans, 1750–2010

New article out in Architectural Histories

Abstract: While the study of building types is a well-known and relatively active research field, the topic of room types is less explored. This article takes a broad approach to spatial categorization, enabling the examination of different types of spaces over longer periods. How do different room types evolve and die? How do the different residential room types relate to each other? Do they act alone or do they follow each other over time? The article looks at the particular evolution and development of Swedish residential room types and is based on the study of plans of 2,340 Swedish buildings from about 1750 to 2010. Six themes emerged from this study: thresholds of birth and extinction, abruptive change, the relation between absent and present room types, contagious types, different temporal scales and the stabilization of prototypical sets.

Children’s play kitchen, or lekkök (Byggmästaren 1951: 451).

Call for papers. Theme issue on Built Environment, Ethics and Everyday Life

This is a call for a theme issue in the Open Access journal Urban Planning

Title: Built Environment, Ethics and Everyday Life
Editors: Mattias Kärrholm and Sandra Kopljar (Lund University, Sweden)

Deadline for Abstracts: 31 December 2019
Deadline for Full Papers: 31 May 2020
Issue Release: November/December 2020

Information: Urban ethics has come to the fore in recent debates concerning our built environment, and includes discussions on spatial justice (Fainstein, 2010), diversity (Sennett, 2018), urban politics (Mostafavi, 2017) and the green imperative (Fox, 2000). Ethics has also become a more pressing issue as the consequences of our actions increasingly take on new scalar levels (La Cecla & Zanini, 2013), involving ourselves as well as our environment. In fact, it seems gradually clearer that ethics must be expanded on to include more actors other than just humans (Stengers, 2003; Yaneva & Zaera-Polo, 2017).

Urban materialities affect how we live our lives. If the roads are wide and comfortable, we drive. If there is no green space available close by, we might take the car to a park. The built environment takes part in producing our actions and, as such, it also takes part in the co-production of an ethic. Hajer and Reijndorp (2001, p. 124) have described how “fences take the place of difficult individual, moral choices: shall I pay for the metro or not”. Our everyday morale is thus never produced by us alone—our intentions are not formed outside the world but in the middle of it. Some things and choices seems to be increasingly made invisible by means of design (for example in so called smart city solutions), by designs favoring clarity over complexity (Sennett, 2018). This in turn frames certain aspects as more important or salient than others, potentially decreasing the affordances and diversity of our built environment.

The goal of this thematic issue is to investigate this complex relation (and progressively more so) between built environment and everyday ethics. We hope for a wide variety of different contributions that reflect on these issues through empirical as well as theoretical investigations. Contributions can, for example, include (but is in no way limited to) studies of how ethics play into: designing for visibility or invisibility, spaces of urban protests and politics, different urban cultures, planning for equality and diversity, sustainable design, smart cities, and/or the social effects of urban design and planning.

References

Fainstein, S. (2010). The just city. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Fox, W. (2000). Ethics and the built environment. London: Routledge.
Hajer, M., & Reijndorp, A. (2001). In search of new public domain. Rotterdam: Nai.
La Cecla, F., & Zanini, P. (2013). The culture of ethics. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Mostafavi, M. (2017). Ethics of the urban. Zürich: Lars Müller.
Sennett, R. (2018). Building and dwelling: Ethics for the city. London: Allen Lane.
Stengers, I. (2003). Cosmopolitics I-II. Minneapolis, Mn: Minnesota University Press.
Yaneva, A., & Zaera-Polo, A. (2017). What Is cosmopolitical design? Design, nature and the built environment. Abingdon-on-Thames: Taylor & Francis.

Instructions for Authors: Authors interested in submitting a paper for this issue are asked to consult the journal's editorial policies and to send their abstracts (about 200-250 words, with a tentative title) by email to the journal's editorial office (up@cogitatiopress.com) by 31 December 2019.

The Neighbourhood in Pieces: The Fragmentation of Local Public Space in a Swedish Housing Area

New article written together with Johan Wirdelöv in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

In this article, we investigate the transformation of local public spaces in the ethnically and socially diverse housing area Norra Fäladen during 1970–2015. After being built, the area soon faced stigmatization and became known as a problem area. This was followed by a series of investments in local public spaces aiming for a stronger appropriation of the neighbourhood by its inhabitants. The production of a ‘neighbourhood spirit’ has, however, slowly deteriorated over the last two decades. Through the introduction of new areas, with large single‐family houses on the one hand, and a densification of the existing housing stock on the other, the inhabitants’ dependence on the existing (but now decreasing) public spaces within the area has been polarized. Local public spaces are also being increasingly relocated from central parts of the neighbourhood to the peripheries or outside the area. In this article, we investigate how this quite slow, yet steady, transformation has affected the local public spaces and the everyday life of the area.

Fäladstorget. Photo taken on 13 December 2012 from the Church tower. In the background we see the school with the local library. The high‐rise building on the left is an addition from 2011 (photo by Albin Brönmark, reproduced by permission of Bilder i Syd)

Scale alignment

New article in Urban Design International

Abstract: Globalisation has led to the transformation and proliferation of urban borders. Old hierarchies and relations between centres and sub-centres and centres and peripheries are challenged, and new alliances between different places and districts are formed. How can urban design and urban design research meet the challenges of a complex and quickly transforming multi-scalar society? In this article I make three arguments. First, I argue for a territorial perspective that would allow us to better acknowledge how actors of different scales come together and have effects on the level of urban design. Second, I argue that we need to better acknowledge the role of material culture in research on urban design; whereas urban design often benefits from the large-scale perspective of urban morphology, it seldom incorporates the roles of small-scale objects into studies. Finally, I argue that an important task for researchers in urban design is to see how actors of different scales are aligned, and through this alignment produce effects and changes in the ways in which our cities are used.

Keywords: Scale  Urban design  Material culture 

Seminar in Trento

Upcoming event in Padua

Beyond rhythmanalysis

Beyond rhythmanalysis: towards a territoriology of rhythms and melodies in everyday spatial activities

Article in City, Territory and Architecture, written together with Andrea Mubi Brighenti.

Abstract: The recent, rich scholarship on rhythms, following in the wake of Lefebvre’s book Éléments de rythmanalyse (1992), proves that rhythmanalysis is an important sensitising notion and research technique. Despite its increasing recognition, however, rhythmanalysis has not yet become a proper science as its proponents had hoped. In this article, we argue that rhythmanalysis could benefit from being further developed and integrated into a wider science of territories. What research must attain is, we suggest, not simply a recording, description or analysis of rhythms; instead, the goal is to capture the life of rhythms as they enter territorial formations. A neo-vitalistic conception, in other words, could enrich the standard social-scientific understanding of the relation between rhythms and territories. More specifically, we submit that the notion of rhythm could be explored not only in terms of the recurrent patterns of association it defines, but also with essential reference to the intensive situations and moments it generates and, in the end, territorialises.

Fernand Deligny, Lignes d’erre [Wander Lines]. Courtesy Maison d'édition l’Arachnéen, Paris

Atmospheres of retail and the asceticism of civilized consumption

Article in Geographica Helvetica, written together with Andrea Mubi Brighenti

Abstract. During recent decades, consumption-oriented spaces of comfort and hospitality have proliferated – including, for instance, lounge shopping malls, food court plazas, spas, entertainment retail, visitor centres, and the development of ever larger pedestrian precincts. In this article we explore shopping malls as capitalist domes in Sloterdijk's sense. We observe atmospheric production, atmospheric management and atmospheric culture (which we propose to call atmoculture) inside such domes. Processes of retailization and mallification – whereby shopping malls and retail spaces absorb increasing economic and societal energies – can be regarded as correlative to the rise of an atmoculture of civilized consumption. Such atmoculture is visible for instance in stress-avoidance strategies and the production of a pleasurable experience in consumption-oriented public zones. The design of contemporary retail spaces seems to pivot around specific atmospheric strategies developed to promote and sustain civilized consumption. In this piece, we describe four different strategies of atmospheric production, identifying their possible shortcomings and failings. Finally, we advance the hypothesis that the atmospheric production of retail can also be analyzed with reference to Sloterdijk's theorization of asceticism as self-disciplination.

Nicosia

At the AESOP Public Spaces and Urban Cultures Conference on Cyprus. The conference was held in the buffer zone splitting Nicosia into two parts.

(Photo by MK)

Urban Walls. Political and Cultural Meanings of Vertical Structures and Surfaces

Edited by Andrea Mubi Brighenti & Mattias Kärrholm. Contracted by Routledge (Classical and Contemporary Social Theory Series). Forthcoming in 2018.

Cover image, artwork “POST NO DREAMS” by John Fenker 1978.

Description

In recent years, an increasing number of separation walls have been built around the world. Walls built in urban areas are particularly striking in that they have exacted a heavy toll in terms of human suffering. As territorialising devices, walls can be protective, but the protection they grant is never straightforward. This collection invites inquiry into the complexities of the social life of walls, observing urban spaces as veritable laboratories of wall-making – places where their consequences become most visible. A study of the relationship between walls and politics, the cultural meaning of walls and their visibility, whether as barriers or as legible – sometimes spectacular – surfaces, and their importance for social processes, Urban Walls shows how walls extend into media spaces, thus drawing a multidimensional geography of separation, connection, control and resistance. As such, the collection will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, geography, architecture and politics with interests in urban studies and social theory.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors

Introduction: The Life of Walls – In Urban, Spatial and Political Theory (Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm)

1. On Walls in the Open City (Alison Young)

2. Dismantling Belfast Peace Walls: New material arrangements for improving community relations (Florine Ballif)

3. Walling Through Seas: The Indian Ocean, Australian border security, and the political present (Peter Chambers)

4. Walls, walling and the immunitarian imperative (Claudio Minca and Alexandra Rijke)

5. Screening Brazil: Footnotes on a Wall (Pedro Victor Brandão and Andrea Pavoni)

6. Warsaw Afterimages: Of Walls and Memories (Ella Chmielewska)

7. Wall Terrains. Architecture, body culture and parkour (Emma Nilsson)

8. Gating housing in Sweden: Walling in the privileged, walling out the public (Karin Grundström)

9. The Right to the City Is the Right to the Surface: A Case for a Surface Commons (in 8 Arguments, 34 Images and some Legal Provisions) (Sabina Andron)

10. The Multiple Walls of Graffiti Removal. Maintenance and Urban Assemblage in Paris (Jérôme Denis and David Pontille)

11. Walls as Fleeting Surfaces. From Bricks to Pixels, Trains to Instagram (Lachlan MacDowall)

Index

Reviews

"Walls and cities have long been partners, but their relationship has been understudied. This creative and important collection takes the social and political work of the urban wall seriously. Rather than a self-evident object, the wall becomes lively, talkative, mobile, and ambivalent, dividing yet also connecting. A valuable and original contribution."

Nicholas Blomley, Professor, Geography, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.

"It is a remarkable feat for an edited volume to read as cohesively and with such strong focus as Urban Walls. The walls included here (violent walls, but also vulnerable ones; aquatic, immunising, yet totally exposed and medialised walls; affective and playful, immaterial and palimpsestic walls) are marked by the wounds of history, geography and politics that surround them but also that are generated by them. These walls feel as material and fleshy as if we were placing our hand on their surface."

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Professor, Law & Theory, University of Westminster, London.

"An instructive and compelling examination of walls in their multiple present forms. The emphasis on the material and vertical puts this at the heart of contemporary debates. Historically situated, richly illustrated, and with a view to wider themes as much as empirical detail, this is an important contribution to politics, geography and urban studies."

Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography, University of Warwick.