“Kulturell Allemansrätt” I / The Right to Public Access and Commoning Workshop  

Location: Rönninge countryside (15-18 June) and the Technical Museum in Stockholm, Djurgården and Gärdet (21-23 June). June, 2021.

In the summer of 2021, a group of six fifteen-year-old young people, and six educators and researchers in arts, crafts, architecture, and political sciences, as well as an educator from Hovsjö Youth Centre, embarked on a trip from the neighbourhood of Hovsjö in Södertälje to Stockholm’s museum area at the edge of Djurgården (the Royal Game Park) — specifically, to The National Museum of Science and Technology.  

We had spent the previous week in the countryside in Rönninge to prepare a workshop for the museum, with a caravan that was transformed into mobile research station. Our aim was to explore the notion of the Swedish concept of Allemansrätt and what this could mean for our group in the specific context of their district, the city, the park, and the museum. 

In the countryside we built equipment for self-sufficiency: seating furniture, pizza ovens, a multi-use table tennis/table, racks to play, and a canopy for the caravan. The caravan was set up in front of the museum. Our program for three days consisted of studying the different environments of the park and the museum, and our installation also became a place for visitors —mostly school classes visiting the museum—to hang out.  

Excursions were made into the landscaped parklands of Djurgården by way of a dérive notebook and an open source, browser-based application called Memories of the Future, which was used for mapping our walks and surroundings. By working with this map-based tool to document our experiences through speech, text, and pictures, allowed us to simultaneously alter and augment the map and experiment with space also in the digital realm. The aim of using a password protected and open source-based app was to allow for discussions on rights and data protection in the digital space.

           

Glossary

A

Allemansrätt [Swedish]/ The Right of Public Access

Allemansrätt is a code of conduct that gives everybody equal access to landscapes and natures and the freedom of movement, connected to the responsibility of handling environments carefully. In some cases, it overwrites the right to private ownership. The concept is known at least since medieval times, but in Sweden, the term was established in governmental inquiries, in the 1940s. Learning to use a landscape with care involves observation, the acquisition of an ability to read landscape, to get to know an environment, to understand possibilities and limits for moving around, sleeping over, resting, picking edibles or material from the ground, to be informed about what can be left behind and what not, where and when and with what material to light a fire, etc.

This means that there are temporal, seasonal, geographical, and situational differences at stake that ought to be registered at any time visiting and considered when deciding what/not to do in a landscape to both access and maintain it. Donna Haraway’s suggestion of response-ability as our capacity of responding to our environments can be invoked here, relating people to the landscapes through their practices of care and response-ability. 

Allemansrätten is a spatio-ethical concept with social and economic implications. It is non-commercial but supports subsistence perspectives such as picking berries, fishing, drinking water from wells. As a concept, it is potentially expandable to imagine spatial situations beyond landscapes where it can foreground ecologies, rights and responsibilities in public environments, and in both virtual and physical spaces. In the broadest sense, open-source applications, part of creative commons, can be seen as constituting a more recent form of Allemansrätt (see FLOSS). Their use allows for discussions on rights and data protection in the digital space.  

Read more on Allemansrätt here: https://www.naturvardsverket.se/allemansratten/ (accessed 16 February 2024).   

Haraway, Donna (2026). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 89.

By Meike Schalk

D

Dérive Notebook

A dérive notebook entails sets of directions and questions allowing walkers to take unexpected routes and focus on aspects of their surroundings that usually escape attention. The directions are also there to nudge walkers to perceiving what feels uncomfortable and comfortable in public space: If I only walk pressed against the wall of buildings, how does that make me feel? Or, if I start following a passer-by on the street, when do I start feeling like a stalker?

By Elizabeth Calderón Lüning

F

FLOSS Technologies

FLOSS stands for Free/Libre and Open Source Software and is a combination of two different technology movements — the free software movement and the open source software movement. The free software movement focuses on the freedom of computer users to use the software, examine, and modify the code within the software and to redistribute copies of the software with or without modifications. The open-source movement has a more pragmatic view, where the focus lies in the openness of the code, not specifically connecting this to questions of freedom and justice. With the term FLOSS, both these views are represented. FLOSS tries to find a neutral form for describing technologies accessibility, openness, and inclusivity. 

By Anette Göthlund

Following

Following is a research method developed in the Full Loop project. It is based on registering collective and creative learning processes that question traditional authoritative knowledge transfer. It is designed to disrupt epistemic hierarchies, especially when learning together with young people.

Following puts young people at centre, as competent and actively knowing subjects in artistic co-creative activities. Following young people in their learning means recording how they name, materialise, and shape the worlds they are part of. It means letting their realities emerge and supporting them in trusting that their experiences and knowledges are meaningful, and sharing their specific concerns. Following emerges in collective learning situations. It enables transformations in relational-spatial explorations and meaning-making processes that happen on the young participants’ terms, so that they become the authors of their own learning experiences.

By Miro Sazdic Löwstedt

K

Knowledge and Learning 

Knowledge is basically defined as the possession of information or the possession of the ability to locate desired information. Learning is defined as the process of acquiring knowledge. Knowledge, however, only becomes knowledge-able through performance; knowledge is performed. Knowledge is situated, relational, and embodied. Different contexts and different bodies produce, present, and represent different knowledges. Knowledge is performed differently depending on time and geography, and depending on who the knowledge-performing subject is, and to which community they belong. Learning can also be considered a practice of knowledging, i.e. collaborative and co-created processes of culture, matter, and meaning-making.    

  

Haraway, Donna (1988). ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. Feminist Studies, Autumn, 1988, Vol. 14, No. 3, 575-599.   

hooks, bell (1994). Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge   

Lenz Taguchi, Hillevi (2010). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education. Introducing an intra-active pedagogy. New York, NY: Routledge.  

By Anette Göthlund

L

Learning Event

Thinking about learning as an event connects to the idea that knowledge is performed — a learning process always in the making. Gilles Deleuze describes processes as becomings, not to be judged by some final result, but by the way they proceed and their power to continue. In the “philosophy of difference” assigned to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the event is described as an intermezzo, something that appears in a space in-between, when dichotomies transverse (for example those that separate science and art, theory and practice). Thus, a learning event is a ‘happening’ and not about copying or reproducing what others know — the learners must produce the knowledge by themselves to be able to learn.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1988). A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism & Schizophrenia, London: The Athlone Press.    

Deleuze, Gilles (1995). Negotiations. 1972–1990, New York: Columbia University Press.   

Dahl, Thomas(2019). The poiesis and mimesis of learning. In Østern, Anna-Lena & Knudsen, Kristian Nødtvedt (eds) (2019). Performative approaches in arts education: artful teaching, learning, and research. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. 

By Anette Göthlund

M

Memories of the Future – an Open-source Application

Memories of the Future is an open-source and browser-based application developed by the Design Research Lab at the University of the Arts, Berlin. The application is geo-map based and allows the users to geo-tag a location and add information to that point, and to add sound files, pictures, or text to the point. Other users can also comment on the geo-tagged points. The app was developed as a community research tool for creating and sharing location-based knowledge. The information sourced by the app is private by design, since you can only access the information with a set password, that is decided upon by the project group. For more information see: https://memories-of-the-future.de/#/ 

By Anette Göthlund

P

Platform Economy

Digital platforms that are helping us move through the city on E-Scooters, deliver our food directly to our homes, let us find our way through ubiquitous GPS maps, organize childcare or cleaning services, rent out our flats to tourists, are becoming everyday infrastructures of cities. The platformization of the urban, signifies a shift in the municipal economy, where proprietary, private technology firms are having an increased say in residents’ everyday lives. The digitally-enabled socio-technical shift, understood as platform urbanism, is creating new forms of social, economic and political interactions (Caprotti, Chang, & Joss, 2022).  

Understanding platform urbanism, can be difficult, since the technologies, their data extractivist behaviour and their defining algorithms are hidden (black boxed) making the scrutiny of the technology close to impossible. We can however start understanding this shift by looking at the politics of platforms — by seeing platforms as “architectures that are thoroughly part of the urban” (Fields, Bissell, & Macrorie, 2020). By engaging with the material, social and somatic implications of platforms in cities, we can start studying platform urbanism beyond the technological black box.  

Caprotti, Federico, Chang, I.-Chun Catherine, & Joss, Simon (2022). Beyond the smart city: a typology of platform urbanism. Urban Transformations, 4. doi:10.1186/s42854-022-00033-9 

Fields, Desiree, Bissell, David, & Macrorie, Rachel (2020). ‘Platform methods: studying platform urbanism outside the black box’. Urban Geography, 41(3), 462-468. doi:10.1080/02723638.2020.1730642 

By Elizabeth Calderón Lüning