The Learnings/Unlearnings Reader #1 (February 2025): Performing the Archive is guest edited by Sara Brolund de Carvalho and Meike Schalk. The Reader includes contributions from the section “Embedding Environmental Learning Histories” from the conference Learnings /Unlearnings: Environmental Pedagogies, Play, Policies, and Spatial Design, which took place in Stockholm in autumn 2024. Drawing from the realms of architecture, craft, design, art- and play pedagogies, Reader #1 addresses historical case studies, art works, and historiographic insights, providing a critical lens from which to view contemporary practices within the field. The Reader includes contributions by Anne Pind; Amy Brookes, Fiona MacDonald, Kieran Mahon, and David Roberts; Camilla Carlsson, Sol Pérez-Martinéz, Henrika Ylirisku.

Available here:

https://urgentpedagogies.iaspis.se/up-reader-044-ar-learnings-unlearnings-performing-the-archive/

From the conference call:

As a field “Environmental Learning” has sought to advance an understanding of the environment through spatial practices — such as art, architecture, craft, design, and planning — by ways of learning, often employing immersive, embodied, and experimental pedagogical formats. In this conference we address “environmental” from a broad perspective of learning with, for, and from the environment. With the attention currently given to lifelong learning by universities and intergovernmental organizations (UNESCO, EU, UN Sustainable Development Goals), we see an opening towards activating and developing environmental learning pedagogies for spatial subjects in contexts of formal, informal, and non-formal learning. 

We invite contributions by practitioners and researchers working with education within the built environment that explore the link between spatial practices and pedagogy, through analyses, reflections, instructed conversations, explorative workshops, exhibits, performances, policy proposals, or other approaches. 

This report documents the conversations that occurred during two seminars, “Caring for Plans: Narratives of the Parallel Society Package”, held at the Copenhagen Architecture Festival CAFx, October 17, 2021,1 and “Solidarity in Times of Repressive Politics: A Seminar on the Effects of the Concepts ‘Particularly/Vulnerable Areas’”, held at Folkets Husby, October 15, 2022, in the Stockholm suburb of Husby.

Narratives about the “failure” of large-scale housing from the postwar decades are now guiding major physical, social, and economic changes in neighborhoods all over Europe. Denmark and Sweden have long been known for their welfare-state systems and benevolent housing policies. However, in recent years, both countries have enacted new national “anti-segregation” measures that call for major physical and social changes to neighborhoods built in the 1960s and 1970s. In these processes, the opinions of local communities and residents of the neighborhoods have seldom been heard. By working with “witness seminars,” a method adopted from oral history, it is our aim to foreground residents’ perspectives and how they have enacted solidarity and collective resistance to these measures.

Narratives about the ‘failure’ of large-scale post-World War II housing are now guiding major physical, social, and economic changes in neighborhoods all over Europe. This is true even in Denmark and Sweden, which have long been known for their welfare states and benevolent housing policies. Today, however, both countries have enacted new national anti-segregation measures that call for major physical and social changes to neighborhoods built in the postwar era, even as the opinions of local communities and residents of such neighborhoods have been only sparsely heard – if at all. By working with the method ‘witness seminars’, we – as the research collective Aktion Arkiv – foreground residents’ perspectives and their collective resistance: the effects and affects of top-down changes. While sharing their lived experiences and actions, residents say that architects and planners can ‘simply say no’ and thereby refuse to participate in these actions.

In summer 2017, we followed an invitation by Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny to take part in the public workspace of their project Care+Repair in the Nordbahnhalle; a project connected to the Vienna Biennale and organized by the Architekturzentrum Wien (Az W). In this way, the group Action Archive from Stockholm began to collaborate with the city planner and activist Beatrice Stude from Vienna. Our work followed a joint interest in common rooms and the commons. Since 2014, Action Archive has been exploring the history and role of common rooms in Swedish welfare housing. This publication collects the notes from our ethnographic field studies of summer 2017 of newly built common rooms in the Nordbahnviertel (the Northern Railway District) in Vienna. It comprises excerpts from guided home tours and interviews with representatives of the Nordbahn district management and a non-profit housing developer. This publication serves as point of departure for a Forum Theatre piece, which deals with common rooms as a conflict area between bureaucracy and community action that is shown in connection with the exhibition Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet (Az W, 2019).

This publication is dedicated to the study of common rooms (Gemeinschaftsräume) in recent examples of subsidized housing in the Nordbahnviertel (the Northern Railway District) in Vienna, against a backdrop of the historical Swedish welfare state model. We illustrate how collectivity and community are influenced by the legal framework and the division of labour. In doing so, we emphasize that collectivity and community do not mean the same thing: while sharing spaces, tools, and services can be described as collective uses, creating community requires greater effort, the provisioon of appropriate space, and the investment of free time.

Diese Publikation ist der Untersuchung von Gemeinschaftsräumen, in jüngeren Beispielen des geförderten Wohnbaus, im Nordbahnviertel in Wien gewidmet. Wie diskutieren diese hier vor dem Hintergrund des historischen schwedischen Wohlfahrtsstaatsmodells. Wir zeigen, wie Kollektivität und Gemeinschaft von legalen Rahmenwerken und Arbeitsteilungen beeinflusst wird. Dabei möchten wir herausstellen, dass Kollektivität und Gemeinschaft für uns nicht das Gleiche bedeutet. Während das Teilen von Räumen, Werkzeugen und Dienstleistungen etwa als kollektive Nutzungen bezeichnet werden können, erfordet das Schaffen von Gemeinschaft größere Bemühungen, die Bereitstellung geeigneter Räume und freie Zeit.

The legendary Swedish welfare state model comprised, on its smallest scale, an infrastructure of ‘common rooms’ (gemensamhetslokaler). Here, we explore common rooms as a spatio-social concept inspired by ‘the commons’. We argue that common rooms were fundamental to the Swedish welfare state model until the 1990s, and that the divorce of the spatial dimension from the social apparatus contributed to its decline. Using recent common rooms (Gemeinschaftsräume) in subsidized housing in Vienna as our empirical example, we illustrate how collectivity is influenced by changing legal frameworks, with common rooms receiving new attention in recent sustainable housing policies. On the micro level, we explore how these have led to paranoid constructions, but also to reparative acts and rituals of care for common rooms and their communities. What can we learn from this, and what larger structures of care can we develop for the future?