How can we understand, explore, and articulate embodied and practical knowledge in relation to artistic practice and research? How can the process of articulating this type of knowledge deepen an understanding of artistic processes and research? What is the relationship between listening and the formation of knowledge in this context? The lecture will be offered exploring different forms of knowledge, with a specific focus on practical knowledge. The goal is to broaden the conceptual framework of what knowledge can be, moving beyond traditional intellectual forms of understanding to include tacit, sensual and bodily knowledge. This approach will also examine the boundaries between knowing and not-knowing, exploring the possibilities that lie within the gaps or uncertainties in our understanding.  

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. 

In 2022 we received funding from the Knowledge Foundation (KK stiftelsen) to, for two years, work on an interdisciplinary education, based at Södertörn and Konstfack at the same time, for people from the broad field of “designed living environments”, i.e. the public sphere. We had worked in this field from different positions and had all experienced that spatial planning is becoming increasingly complex and is faced with increased demands to deal with ethical issues of everything from species extinction, climate change and inequality in an uncertain world. Practitioners in art, architecture, form and design as well as urban planning, market developing and construction are faced with new competence requirements activated by this, and there is a great need for an in-depth exchange of knowledge and experience between different capacities. We have also experienced that different capacities feel isolated from others, even when we discuss processes that involve many different experiences.During 2022–2023 we conducted a series of workshops with professional groups within the field following Pohl et al. (2017) on how to make research societally relevant. Based on the results of these workshops, we started to build two curricula, one at Södertörn University and one at Konstfack. Students can apply to both schools, depending on their educational background, and they will study together until the last semester, when they will do their thesis. The program, which will start in September 2024, is based on the assumption that there is a multiplicity of knowledge to be managed, and the challenge is to get the different perspectives to meet and learn from each other. This means that students (both) need to come to a deeper understanding of their own position to understand this position in relation to others. In this paper presentation we will discuss the challenges and learning outcomes with creating a course like this, highlighting that the cooperation with external stakeholders was relatively uncomplicated, but several challenges were discovered when it came to synchronizing two different types of universities. Topics ranged from different understandings of what constitutes an academic course, to how many students to accept, to how to synchronize two different academic bureaucratic systems.

I detta föredrag utforskar jag samspelet mellan planeringens praktik, medborgardialoger och konstnärligt arbete inom ramen för gestaltade livsmiljöer. Med utgångspunkt i konkreta exempel diskuterar jag de skavningar och målkonflikter som uppstår i samverkansprocesser där många aktörer och perspektiv möts.

Jag intresserar mig särskilt för det som sker i mikropraktiken, i det konkreta görandet, bortom de förenklade narrativ om ”best practice” och lyckade exempel som ofta lyfts fram i stadsplaneringssammanhang. Istället vill jag ge plats för det brokiga, osäkra och ibland misslyckade – och visa att även dessa situationer bär på viktig kunskap.

Föredraget bygger på min forskning om planeringsprocesser med fokus på frågor om demokrati, deltagande och inkludering. Jag undersöker hur olika kroppar, erfarenheter och kunskapsformer tillåts ta plats – eller exkluderas – i dialogarbete och hur konstnärer, med sin kritiska och ifrågasättande roll, både kan utmana och missförstås i dessa sammanhang.

Genom exempel visar jag hur höga förväntningar på samverkan och kreativitet ibland krockar med de praktiska och politiska realiteter som dialogledare behöver hantera. Jag diskuterar hur konstnärer ofta bjuds in som förväntade problemlösare eller inspiratörer, men i praktiken ibland reduceras till att leverera "det kreativa" utan att ges utrymme för det fördjupande eller det kritiska.

Jag argumenterar för att samverkan behöver förstås inte bara som ett gott ideal utan också som en komplex och ofta konfliktfylld praktik. Det kräver att vi tränar oss i en form av aktivt och politiskt lyssnande – ett lyssnande som inte bara bekräftar det vi redan vet, utan som vågar stå kvar i det som skaver, överraskar och inte låter sig enkelt kategoriseras.

Genom att problematisera vad vi menar med ”lyckade dialoger” vill jag öppna upp för en diskussion om vad det innebär att vara professionell i samhällsplaneringens kontext. Är det verkligen det friktionsfria som ska ses som tecken på kvalitet – eller bör vi snarare uppvärdera vår förmåga att hantera det oväntade, det motsägelsefulla och det ännu inte förstådda?

Föreläsningen belyser behovet av ett mer reflekterande och experimentellt förhållningssätt till planering, där fokus flyttas från mätbarhet och resultat mot process, relation och omdöme. I en tid där ”samverkan” ofta lyfts fram som lösningen på komplexa samhällsutmaningar, vill jag bidra med ett perspektiv som erkänner dess potential – men också dess utmaningar.

This presentation offers a situated inside perspective of ambiguities in planning practice. The aim is to explore how ambiguities can be made visible and put to work as a resource for practical wisdom in planning practice. A starting point is that planning is a messy, complex activity, involving high uncertainty, conflicting interests and a multitude of actors. Planning is also about making everyday judgements in new and complex situations (Campbell 2012, Healey, 2020). A wise judgement is however not something that the planner obviously possesses but is an ability that demands constant ‘training’ in practice (Håkansson, 2005; Metzger, 2014). While recent planning research highlight frustrations (Zapata, 2021), tensions (Saldert, 2021), dilemmas (Khakee, 2020), ambiguities (Fridlund, 2017, Wiberg, 2018), there is still a lack of research how such phenomenon can come into the light and be utilized in everyday planning, to foster transformation and changed practice. In this article we are interested in how ambiguities can be made visible and put in used in everyday planning practice. Can ambiguities been used as a resource for practical wisdom in ‘messy’ realities, i.e. to judge what is better or worse without losing sight of possible problematic outcomes of what you put in practice? The empirical material is based on autoethnographic writing from the perspective of two researchers that have former been working for a municipality in the metropolitan area of Stockholm.

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.