This article is about small-scale independent single-store retailers that have been in business since the first half of the 20th century – an overlooked group of actors in retail research. Research has mapped the broader structural changes in the retail industry that have benefitted large-scale operations during the last decade. Still, there is an absence of explanations for the continuous existence of small-scale retail businesses with product lines competing with large-scale actors. Retail research tends to take economic profitability and growth as starting points to interrogate the capacity of businesses to successfully compete. Against this background, the longevity of inner-city small-scale independent stores dating back to the early 20th century remains a puzzle, which calls for looking towards alternative theories to find reasons for the persistence of this line of retail. We engage with this puzzle by exploring practices of valuation engaged by store owners in a selection of small-scale, independent stores established in Gothenburg and Stockholm (Sweden) before the 1950s. We draw on understandings of values as produced through social practices and inquire how forms of caring practices figure in the day-to-day maintenance of the stores as means through which they produce value. The article builds on ethnographic fieldwork focusing on in-store interviews with store owners, employees, and customers complemented with observations. We find that care figures in these stores as expressions of attention and presence, of maintenance and of tacit knowledge, and suggest that the retailers’ focus on the caring practices identified – rather than on prioritizing growth – is key to their continued, long-term existence. Anchored in an understanding of retail as situated in broader social and political processes, and as such also impacting society at large, we moreover emphasise the importance of attentiveness and valuation of, the caring practices that small-scale store owners engage in. 

What makes a place what it is? What makes it valuable? Questions of this type inevitably relate to practices that articulate urban qualities. This paper investigates the processes and practices through which urban qualities are dis/qualified in urban development processes. Such practices frequently tend to focus on particular urban areas and their development, where some concrete and specific situated value is sensed to be at stake, and therefore often come to play out as struggles over the definition of the supposed ‘essence’ of a particular place, and with this, its qualities and value. The paper brings together the literatures of valuation studies and discussions of framing practices in relation to urban development. Drawing upon these theoretical groundings it conceptualises the dis/qualification of urban qualities as a form of ontological politics which articulates value by way of framing practices. Through the analysis of an empirical case drawn from a Swedish context it is argued that although values and qualities can be negotiated, it is nonetheless always highly uncertain to which degree value-negotiations will hold steady further downstream in the urban development process.

The importance of creating forums to give voice to marginalized residents is often emphasized in participatory research and planning practice with the purpose of creating politically equal processes, strengthening democracy and developing social sustainability (Abrahamsson, 2015). At the same time, less focus is placed on the act of listening’s role in relation to what is possible to be heard.

While listening is central to communication and politics, it has received less attention as being political, in regards to its potential for giving voice. The act of listening is more often associated as being passive, whereas voiced language, is associated with the act of writing, reading or speaking. It, therefore, easily falls into a reductive binary of active or passive, which according to the media theorist Kate Lacey (2014), has prevented listening from being viewed as a political action. By shifting the focus from giving voice towards the practices and habits which determine what is considered noise and what is considered voice, we are also paying attention to the political aspects of listening (Palmås and von Bush, 2015).

The starting point for the dissertation is my personal experience as a process leader for two dialogue processes. The first was a municipal citizen dialogue process which I carried out in Botkyrka Municipality, Conversations about the future, between 2011-2012. The second was an exploratory art and research project, Rehearsals – eight acts about the politics of listening, which was carried out together with a group of 30 people at Tensta konsthall between 2013-2014. As a group, we explored different ways to communicate with each other beyond our words.

The purpose of the dissertation is to make visible different dimensions of listening and explore its role in the leadership and organization of citizen dialogues. The intent is to illuminate the messiness and complexity of practice rather than to show success stories.

Philosopher, theologian and mystic, Nicholas of Cusa’s concepts, ratio and intellectus, descriptions of two aspects of reason, are central concepts in the dissertation. While ratio sorts the sensory input we receive by creating categories, dividing things into opposites and making things calculable – and thus viewing life as something one can reach absolute answers about ­– intellectus relates to the fact that we can never know the big picture. Life exceeds us. To live means to be in relation with the knowledge that around everything we surround ourselves with lie dimensions of unknowing. Therefore, intellectus knows that the categories that ratio uses to understand the world are unstable and thus also possible to reshape and reformulate (Bornemark, 2017). In the thesis, I argue that allowing space for intellectus can be a way to listen to the unexpected, to open up to be moved by what you hear, and thereby make room for the political where we can create an increased possibility for the development of different visions of possible futures.

In a Swedish context, public authorities have, over the past 10 years, implemented a number of initiatives to make art a central part of not only sustainable development but also urban planning as a practice, process, and knowledge area. Art and artistic methods are seen to contribute with new methods for site analyses (often in combination with citizen involvement) to enhance embodied and situated knowledge and give space to critical reflection. One of the Swedish initiatives is called Art Is Happening. Between 2016 and 2018, the Swedish government assigned the Public Art Agency Sweden money to work with public art and citizen inclusion in million program areas. The initiative was framed as using artistic methods to strengthen democracy in areas with low turnout. Fifteen places around the country were selected. In this article, the focus is on one of those projects in Karlskrona, where an artist collaborated with citizens to create a public artwork and local meeting place. During the process, the artist partly lived in the area. Rather than discussing the artistic project from a binary logic as disempowerment/empowerment, consensual/agonistic, and political/antipolitical, it is examined as a process involving a mixture of both, where power unfolded in ways that were both problematic and valuable at the same time. This approach moves away from “good or bad” to a nuanced way of discussing how artistic methods can contribute to understandings of situated knowledge production in urban planning.

Although listening holds a central position in communication and politics, it has been devalued through a too one-sided focus on the voice. Listening, as distinct from the speech act, has been bound up in a cultural hierarchy of the senses that privileges the visual over the auditory, and positions listening as something passive, as opposed to acts of writing, reading, and speaking. We want to rethink listening as an embodied and critical activity, one that is not only focused on words but also heeds atmospheres, body languages, and silences. If we learn to listen, we no longer decide in advance to what we want to listen. Listening embraces unpredictability: to listen, to see, to experience, without making preconditioned judgments or analyses. We could say that the act of mutual listening directs us to that which we do not already know: to listen for the unexpected.