My Kind of Town: Malmö’s Folkets Park is the perfect place to think about a better future

Folkets Park, the ‘people’s park’ in Malmö, was founded in 1891 by Sweden’s Social Democrat party. It was, in its first few decades, the meeting point for several rallies and workers’ strikes including the August 1909 Swedish Trade Union Confederation strike. More than 13,000 workers congregated in the park as part of the 300,000-strong nationwide action that ended in a devastating defeat to the Swedish Employers’ Confederation. At the heart of the park is Moriskan, a Moorish pavilion designed by Polish-Jewish architect Aron Wolff Krenzisky in 1901 to create an entertainment palace for those who felt unwelcome in the established bourgeois salons of the time.

This seemed an apt place to talk about private sufficiency and public luxury, of escaping the inequality afforded us by the endless growth paradigm”

The political charge associated with the park was complemented with a more festive character in the 1920s when rides and carousels inspired by Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens were introduced. Sweden’s largest dance floor, the Amiralen, opened in the park in 1939 and was followed, a year later, by the cinema that is now the theatre Nöjesteatern. The park is also home to the Reptilcenter, a charming, if slightly alarming terrarium where many of the spiders and snakes are accompanied by photos of the harm the creatures can inflict on humans.

I was recently in Malmö for the Sixth International Degrowth Conference for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity. The conference was being held in Folkets Park, a part of the city with a long history of striving for social justice. To me, the sense that we were having these conversations in a conducive place was palpable. This seemed an apt place to talk about private sufficiency and public luxury, of escaping the inequality afforded us by the endless growth paradigm, of the importance of collective acts to expend excess energy in convivial festival rather than reinvest every spare second or penny in the bizarrely commercialised leisure, cultural or entertainment industries. Only a very little magical thinking was required to imagine that the land was listening and perpetuating the message that there are alternatives to the hegemony.

The idea that a place, and by extension architecture, has the capacity to nurture or even incite social change is seductive. The delegates at the Degrowth conference were calling for a transition away from ever-increasing GDP growth toward human and environmental wellbeing. What kind of architecture will we create when buildings are no longer instruments of financial accumulation?

So long as architects play a hand in making places, we can take inspiration from Folkets Park and seek to create places to incite social change.”

As productivity gains are slowing in mature economies, GDP growth is faltering, and consumption stagnating. What materials and technologies will we build with when general purpose money no longer allows morally agnostic value engineering? This smaller economy will fortuitously reduce demands on energy, resources, water and food. What kinds of spaces will we inhabit when cultivation, rather than extraction is the goal?

These shifts, however, will not happen quickly enough to avoid a temperature increase to three degrees above pre-industrial levels, triggering self-reinforcing climate change that will be impossible to mitigate. How will the built environment be procured in an economic system that doesn’t seek to exploit global differences in wage levels, land prices, and environmental legislation?

Folkets Park felt a perfect location to debate these matters but since coming home to London it feels as though every place finds resonance in these conversations in one way or another. It’s maybe too easy to dismiss romantic ideas of burrowing out a utopian space under a new social democratic order. It’s maybe too overwhelming to do anything other than write off what can feel like doomsday fantasies. But so long as architects play a hand in making places, and places can resonate with optimistic conversations, then we can take inspiration from Folkets Park and seek to create places to incite social change.