Johan Pries

In terms of research on spatial planning, I came to this field to track the neoliberalization of space as a historic process by studying the records of municipal planning archives while writing my doctoral dissertation about the Swedish city Malmö after 1985. Since, I have become increasingly interested in the interwar emergence of spatial planning in the Nordics, and its flowering in postwar period as a way to spatialize a particular form of social democratic politics in what might be called “welfare landscapes”. After focusing on interwar and postwar planners for a few years, I’ve returned to more contemporary planning questions within a Formas-funded project on the Norra Sorgenfri area of Malmö. In this project I was part of a team which scrutinized plans with the ambition to create a more sustainable city, but also sought to rethink the role of the field site within planning scholarship by gauging the same high-profile postindustrial site from multiple disciplinary approaches. My main ambition coming out of these research projects has been to contribute to how to think about the relationship between theory and practice, and in particular the difficulties in translating the politics of critique to the politics of concretely changing spaces which underpins planning.

In 2024 this work on contemporary planning was extended by a Energimyndigheten project researching how the architectural heritage of the Swedish postwar years figures in debates about preservation of building stock, and in particular concrete buildings, as a sustainability strategy. Also related to this research, and to my role as a co-manager of the department’s Bachelor Programme in Urban and Regional Planning, are two smaller projects funded by Lund university. These explore planning education from the point of view Sweden’s new regional planning instruments and the role of AI in planning and planning education.

The other line of inquiry which I have focused on in the last few years has been related to the political geographies of popular movements. The bulk of this work relates to the Swedish labor movement’s People’s Parks’ (Folkets parker) and their historical geographies, which a VR project with two Uppsala based colleagues has focused on. We have been particularly interested in the way in which how “the people” is framed plays an important role both in landscape imaginaries and in hegemonic politics, which has been the basis for several articles and a book manuscript currently being completed.

This work on popular movements places has been extended into a second Formas-founded project which studies the cultural heritage of the assembly spaces of movements in decline. In particular we have explored how nostalgic framings tend to elide the movement politics that brought these places into being, but also how they shape the use of these places today. The work on the heritage of popular movement meeting places has also been supported by a smaller grant from the Crafoord foundation, which covered salary for a postdoc to contribute to our study of Lund’s People’s Park as a case of a movement public which, after its decline, has become a municipal facility. In some ways this work departs from largely unfunded research I did with a group of colleagues on antifascists and other radical movements in Sweden, primarily since the 1980s, which I hope to be able to return to in some way in the future.