The heritage of popular movements: renewal, preservation and life in the Swedish People’s Parks.

This project centres on how the People’s Parks in Sweden are today treated as heritage, as urban renewal resources, or as civil society meeting spaces.

Thus we trace how these spaces, once established to answer a need for democratic meeting spaces, are today used in a variety of ways.

Meanwhile, different actors strive to remember different pasts in these parks.Originally created to escape state power, the People’s Park have today often instead become local state, municipal, concerns.

Through scrutinising popular movements’ heritage we want to illuminate how these parks thereby exist in a tension between public maintenance and more civil society-based grassroots movements.

How different involved actors act, and how the coalitions maintaining people’s parks matter for how they can be used, is consequently at the forefront of our exploration.

The project will thus foreground how parks could become spatial resources for civil society actors in sustainability transitions.

Furthermore, the project will shed light on how attention to popular movements’ heritage involves tensions between public management and civil society.

Planned preservation per se means transforming something created more bottom-up by popular movements – while it is today far from certain that municipalities maintaining these parks feel that their politics is aligned with these movements.