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 1960, the Swedish furniture designer Bruno Mathsson built a small one-level summerhouse for himself and his wife Karin at Frösakull in southern Sweden. The house was an experiment and was also dubbed the “House of Tomorrow.” Even though not internationally renown today, the house was praised for its innovative architecture at the time and, as Martin Friedman writes in Design Quarterly in 1965: “Constructed over sand dunes and tucked into a forest of dwarf pines, it is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable buildings in modern Sweden”. 

 Frösakull reveals a tension between elegant, sleek American mid-century modernism and brutalist anti-aestheticism. The large, illusory window sections and the undulating, transparent ceiling co-exist with recycled steel rafters, wood slats nailed on slightly askew, and the most basic steel draining board. The building oozes pragmatism rather than aestheticism, and the builder underlines this with his affirmation that Frösakull was not built according to the drawing board but that a great deal was left to the handymen to solve. The design and the solutions are usually the simplest and cheapest possible, and they do not consistently adhere to predetermined notions of measurements, proportions or aesthetics.

Alongside the emergence of Swedish functionalism, another vital movement evolved: the fitness culture. Already at the Stockholm exhibition in 1930 a new anti-consumerist body culture centring on hygienism, outdoor sports, and nudism was presented in parallel with the new media and consumer culture. Bruno Mathsson was a veritable “health architect” who converted the plans of the health programme into a lifestyle.