Waste Green is a Research and Development project in the Arts for The School of Architecture at The Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm by Markus Degerman.
Release at INDEX, Stockholm 2007
Preface (Markus Degerman)
Skräpgrönt (Waste Green) is a project
that explores from an artistic perspective
how quality in urban environments can
be created and changed. The primary
focus has been on changes manifested
mainly in how an area is described, rather
than in physical restructuring.
A crucial part of the project consisted
of the workshop I ran jointly with Professor
Apolonija Šušteršic at the University
College of Fine Arts in Stockholm. The
workshop was based on the debate over
the past few years regarding areas and
environments in Stockholm. Since a large
portion of the debate concerning outer
Stockholm referred to the architectural
environment and only marginally to the
green land and parks, the latter seemed
an interesting and somewhat neglected
subject for us to focus on.
In the workshop we could note
that what is sometimes referred to as a
problem in the suburban environment is
that these areas are surrounded by nature.
This is described, for instance, in terms
such as windy fields, dog enclosures,
wasteland or simply segregating barriers.
Other derogatory words are also used,
such as impediments, that is, economically
useless land, specifically referring
to its “worthlessness”. The surrounding
nature is, in other words, often considered
to lack any real value. However, returning
to the original question: is this really a
bad environment, and does it have qualities
that may have been overlooked?
In practical terms, the project consisted
of applying an artistic perspective
in analysing and highlighting neglected
and unknown qualities in the environment
under scrutiny. I am glad for the
opportunity for the workshop participants
to present their work in this publication.
Waste green (Markus Degerman)
In discussions on the quality of urban
environments, the arguments highlight
certain qualities. These arguments not only
draw up a specific image of a high-quality
environment but also indirectly often
produce a counter-image. Post-structuralist
theory has shown that language
can be analysed in this way, as a system
structured according to concepts that
are invested with meaning by means
of contrast. Thus, ‘good’ cannot be
understood without its opposite, ‘bad’,
and ‘Swede’ is a meaningless concept
without its counterpoint, ‘foreigner’.
Similarly, meaning appears to be given to
the ‘inner-city’ concept by contrasting it
to the ‘suburb’. According to the French
philosopher Jacques Derrida, the relationship
between these so-called binary
opposites is not symmetrical, where one
opposite dominates over the other. In the
context of Stockholm, which consists
of inner- and outer-city areas, there are
many indications that one is regarded
as superior to the other. This language
system of opposites is thus implicated in
creating and maintaining various social
hierarchies. One of the phenomena the
post-structuralists sought to demonstrate
was how value is constructed through this
form of linguistic practice. This involved
posing questions about the knowledge
strategies used to create and maintain invisibility.
By focusing on the dominating
theories and how they can actually make
large parts of the reality that they claim
to represent invisible, they challenged
the categorical reality that is largely conveyed
through binary opposites. Another
famed post-structuralist, Michel Foucault,
pointed to the intimate connection
between power and knowledge. He wrote,
for instance, that:
Every society has its regime of truth, its
general politics of truth. That means
that it has the types of discourses which
accept and allow the truth to exist. It
also has the mechanisms and institutions
which can separate true and false statements;
techniques and procedures which
give the value to the consolidation of the
truth; the status which is responsible for
what is considered to be the truth.
The debate about environments in Stockholm
could easily give the impression
that there are more disadvantages than
advantages in the areas classified as the
suburbs. They are habitually described in
negative terms as barren, boring, without
meaning to the residents, badly planned
or segregated enclaves. Even the green
areas outside the inner city are often, in
comparison with the city parks, regarded
as inferior. The most common description
can be summarised as SLOAP (Space
Left Over After Planning), windy suburban
fields, or waste greens. It appears that
the norm for what constitutes a high-quality
city and park is defined by inner-city
Stockholm. The solution to how the “suburb”
should be developed is frequently
declared to be integration, with more
public spaces, parks, or, in other words:
it should to the greatest possible extent
imitate the normative inner city. But are
these suppositions warranted? Is it likely
that the suburban environment could in
future become more “city-like”, and is
this desirable?
The problem of having fixed ideas
about what a city is, and the intrinsic
value of this environment itself, lies in
how these ideas relate to the suburban
environment. The suburb, as mentioned
previously, is only a suburb in relation
to the inner city, and if the inner city
is the norm for quality, the suburb can
never match it in value. This relationship
becomes clearer when we compare
this discussion with the discourses on,
say, gender or ethnicity, which to a great
extent also involve inequality.
With this in mind, the issue of value
and quality appears less straight-forward.
What are the dominating ideas
on what is considered good nowadays?
Who says so? Who are the winners and
losers in this perspective? Do the ideas
stand up to a critical analysis? Are there
other alternative approaches, and how
am I myself affected? In the introduction
to his book Orientalism (a settling
of accounts with Western notions about
other cultures), Edward W. Said explains
why he chose a particular focus for his
writing, mentioning Gramsci as one of
his points of departure. Gramsci writes
that the starting point of critical elaboration
is a consciousness of what one really
is and is “knowing thyself” as a product
of the historical process to date which
has deposited in you an infinity of traces
without leaving an inventory. Therefore,
it is imperative at the outset to compile
such an inventory. To clarify what I
mean, we can compare the following two
quotes: On 17 March 2005, the Swedish
daily paper Dagens Nyheter reviewed
a dissertation titled Mer park i tätare
stad (More Parks in a Denser City). The
dissertation was by Alexander Ståhle,
School of Architecture, KTH in Stockholm,
and basically concerns the use and
accessibility of green spaces in the city.
Below is an excerpt from the article in
DN:
…A couple of years ago, Temo conducted
a survey that unearthed that people living
in the large estates in outer Stockholm
complained that there was a shortage of
parks, while people living in the inner
city replied that the lack of parks was not
great.
“One could say that the inner-city
parks market themselves,” says Alexander
Ståhle, who believes that if all city
regions were like [posh] Östermalm
there would be no problems. Albert
Lindhagen’s visions are virtually intact.
Lindhagen wanted parks to be readily
available everywhere.
Alexander Ståhle, who has lived all his
life in inner Stockholm, has never experienced
a shortage of parks. He says there
is a lot to be said for Östermalm. But that
does not mean that every suburb should
have its own Östermalm.
The other quote is from Lars Mikael
Raatamaa’s book Politiskt våld (Political
Violence):
…When I was a kid, graffiti was rarely
that advanced. If you wanted to be cool
a stolen marker was useful – the thickest
marker = the coolest. Most of us had
other pens, with which we wrote: “There
is a place on earth/where the sun never
shines/That place is Upplands Väsby/And
I never want to go there again.” That’s
what we were taught. We taught each
other that our experience was worthless.
We learned to falsify our own history.
Those of us who came from Upplands
Väsby, Högdalen, Brandbergen, Hjulsta,
Vårberg. We could sometimes be called
exotic curiosities, but our experience was
disqualified from the start.
In the anthology Bor vi i samma stad
(Are We Living in the Same City), Iren
Molina describes the consequences of
this situation:
As claimed in postcolonial theory, colonisation
is complete when the subconscious
of the subordinates is penetrated by the
prevailing discourses. This is exactly
what happens in the Swedish problem
suburbs today. When the people living
there apply the prevailing discourses to
describe and explain their own situation,
a form of mental colonisation has taken
place.
Since it still appears that the dominating
opinions on what constitutes a good
urban environment takes inner-city
Stockholm as its reference point, and that
these are the opinions that are usually put
forth, the result is ultimately that it is hard
to see or experience reality in any other
way. The city is divided according to a
strict dichotomy of inner city and suburb.
Since the qualitative norm is based on the
inner city, and the suburb by definition
is not a city, the relationship between
them is unequal in that sense. Postcolonial
and feminist researchers have also
identified that such a division into binary
opposites generates and reinforces social
hierarchies. The inner city and the idea
of urbanity do not necessarily have to be
the given yardstick by which everything
else should be measured, as little as
Western society and maleness need be. In
one of the more interesting contributions
to Färgfabriken’s Stockholm at large,
Handbook on the future of Stockholm,
Lars Reuterswärd, professor and head
of UN-Habitat in Nairobi specialising in
global urbanism, points out that there is
a dearth of theories to make the suburb
visible and describe their specific life
content. Instead, these areas are regarded
from an inner-city perspective and also
as a constant problem. “Urban planners
often claim that the public must be gratified
with the ostensibly sound qualities of
the traditional city.”
The suburbs, i.e. the parts of a city on
the periphery of the centre, are clumped
together and attributed the same epithets
and characteristics. However, this is
only part of the truth, for, as Pär Eliaeson
30 31
states in the foreword to the exhibition
Förorten idag – en annan stad (The
Suburb Today – Another City), which he
produced for Arkitekturmuseet in 1999:
A common denominator for the various
suburbs is the modern urban development
plan, with a spacious positioning
of the tall buildings and a separation of
functions and traffic. The planning and
architecture are often used as an excuse
for the problems in low-status suburbs,
even though the suburbs with a higher
status have the same features. Architects
and others argue that tall apartment
blocks, large neighbourhoods, terse
architecture and purely domestic areas
unfailingly lead to negative social effects
and bad health. The only “worthy” and
“humane” city consists of buildings with
a maximum of five storeys with shops at
street level, laid out in closed blocks that
enable “social control” and “identification”
through a “varied” and “personal”
architecture. The consequence is that the
suburb must be corrected in order to become
a “real city”. Personal preferences
glorified into truth.
The idea that the suburb must be integrated
with the city is troublingly similar
to the perspective on the multicultural
society. Homi Bhabha describes how the
support and encouragement for cultural
diversity in practice counteracts cultural
diversity. He claims that a general norm
arises, instituted by dominating culture,
where the argument appears to be that
“other cultures may all be very well,
but they need to be adapted to our
conditions.” This constitutes what he
describes as creating cultural diversity
while preventing cultural variation.
The relationship between inner city and
suburb has similarities: the suburbs are
fine, but they should be adapted to the
inner city. Instead of having a city where
different forms of urbanisation co-exist,
we get a type of city where something
called the “suburb” may be included in
theory but not in practice, and definitely
not on its own terms. Here, as elsewhere,
the consequence is that certain qualities
are ignored, injustices are created and
resources destroyed or unutilised.
Release at INDEX, Stockholm 2007
Preface (Markus Degerman)
Skräpgrönt (Waste Green) is a project
that explores from an artistic perspective
how quality in urban environments can
be created and changed. The primary
focus has been on changes manifested
mainly in how an area is described, rather
than in physical restructuring.
A crucial part of the project consisted
of the workshop I ran jointly with Professor
Apolonija Šušteršic at the University
College of Fine Arts in Stockholm. The
workshop was based on the debate over
the past few years regarding areas and
environments in Stockholm. Since a large
portion of the debate concerning outer
Stockholm referred to the architectural
environment and only marginally to the
green land and parks, the latter seemed
an interesting and somewhat neglected
subject for us to focus on.
In the workshop we could note
that what is sometimes referred to as a
problem in the suburban environment is
that these areas are surrounded by nature.
This is described, for instance, in terms
such as windy fields, dog enclosures,
wasteland or simply segregating barriers.
Other derogatory words are also used,
such as impediments, that is, economically
useless land, specifically referring
to its “worthlessness”. The surrounding
nature is, in other words, often considered
to lack any real value. However, returning
to the original question: is this really a
bad environment, and does it have qualities
that may have been overlooked?
In practical terms, the project consisted
of applying an artistic perspective
in analysing and highlighting neglected
and unknown qualities in the environment
under scrutiny. I am glad for the
opportunity for the workshop participants
to present their work in this publication.
Waste green (Markus Degerman)
In discussions on the quality of urban
environments, the arguments highlight
certain qualities. These arguments not only
draw up a specific image of a high-quality
environment but also indirectly often
produce a counter-image. Post-structuralist
theory has shown that language
can be analysed in this way, as a system
structured according to concepts that
are invested with meaning by means
of contrast. Thus, ‘good’ cannot be
understood without its opposite, ‘bad’,
and ‘Swede’ is a meaningless concept
without its counterpoint, ‘foreigner’.
Similarly, meaning appears to be given to
the ‘inner-city’ concept by contrasting it
to the ‘suburb’. According to the French
philosopher Jacques Derrida, the relationship
between these so-called binary
opposites is not symmetrical, where one
opposite dominates over the other. In the
context of Stockholm, which consists
of inner- and outer-city areas, there are
many indications that one is regarded
as superior to the other. This language
system of opposites is thus implicated in
creating and maintaining various social
hierarchies. One of the phenomena the
post-structuralists sought to demonstrate
was how value is constructed through this
form of linguistic practice. This involved
posing questions about the knowledge
strategies used to create and maintain invisibility.
By focusing on the dominating
theories and how they can actually make
large parts of the reality that they claim
to represent invisible, they challenged
the categorical reality that is largely conveyed
through binary opposites. Another
famed post-structuralist, Michel Foucault,
pointed to the intimate connection
between power and knowledge. He wrote,
for instance, that:
Every society has its regime of truth, its
general politics of truth. That means
that it has the types of discourses which
accept and allow the truth to exist. It
also has the mechanisms and institutions
which can separate true and false statements;
techniques and procedures which
give the value to the consolidation of the
truth; the status which is responsible for
what is considered to be the truth.
The debate about environments in Stockholm
could easily give the impression
that there are more disadvantages than
advantages in the areas classified as the
suburbs. They are habitually described in
negative terms as barren, boring, without
meaning to the residents, badly planned
or segregated enclaves. Even the green
areas outside the inner city are often, in
comparison with the city parks, regarded
as inferior. The most common description
can be summarised as SLOAP (Space
Left Over After Planning), windy suburban
fields, or waste greens. It appears that
the norm for what constitutes a high-quality
city and park is defined by inner-city
Stockholm. The solution to how the “suburb”
should be developed is frequently
declared to be integration, with more
public spaces, parks, or, in other words:
it should to the greatest possible extent
imitate the normative inner city. But are
these suppositions warranted? Is it likely
that the suburban environment could in
future become more “city-like”, and is
this desirable?
The problem of having fixed ideas
about what a city is, and the intrinsic
value of this environment itself, lies in
how these ideas relate to the suburban
environment. The suburb, as mentioned
previously, is only a suburb in relation
to the inner city, and if the inner city
is the norm for quality, the suburb can
never match it in value. This relationship
becomes clearer when we compare
this discussion with the discourses on,
say, gender or ethnicity, which to a great
extent also involve inequality.
With this in mind, the issue of value
and quality appears less straight-forward.
What are the dominating ideas
on what is considered good nowadays?
Who says so? Who are the winners and
losers in this perspective? Do the ideas
stand up to a critical analysis? Are there
other alternative approaches, and how
am I myself affected? In the introduction
to his book Orientalism (a settling
of accounts with Western notions about
other cultures), Edward W. Said explains
why he chose a particular focus for his
writing, mentioning Gramsci as one of
his points of departure. Gramsci writes
that the starting point of critical elaboration
is a consciousness of what one really
is and is “knowing thyself” as a product
of the historical process to date which
has deposited in you an infinity of traces
without leaving an inventory. Therefore,
it is imperative at the outset to compile
such an inventory. To clarify what I
mean, we can compare the following two
quotes: On 17 March 2005, the Swedish
daily paper Dagens Nyheter reviewed
a dissertation titled Mer park i tätare
stad (More Parks in a Denser City). The
dissertation was by Alexander Ståhle,
School of Architecture, KTH in Stockholm,
and basically concerns the use and
accessibility of green spaces in the city.
Below is an excerpt from the article in
DN:
…A couple of years ago, Temo conducted
a survey that unearthed that people living
in the large estates in outer Stockholm
complained that there was a shortage of
parks, while people living in the inner
city replied that the lack of parks was not
great.
“One could say that the inner-city
parks market themselves,” says Alexander
Ståhle, who believes that if all city
regions were like [posh] Östermalm
there would be no problems. Albert
Lindhagen’s visions are virtually intact.
Lindhagen wanted parks to be readily
available everywhere.
Alexander Ståhle, who has lived all his
life in inner Stockholm, has never experienced
a shortage of parks. He says there
is a lot to be said for Östermalm. But that
does not mean that every suburb should
have its own Östermalm.
The other quote is from Lars Mikael
Raatamaa’s book Politiskt våld (Political
Violence):
…When I was a kid, graffiti was rarely
that advanced. If you wanted to be cool
a stolen marker was useful – the thickest
marker = the coolest. Most of us had
other pens, with which we wrote: “There
is a place on earth/where the sun never
shines/That place is Upplands Väsby/And
I never want to go there again.” That’s
what we were taught. We taught each
other that our experience was worthless.
We learned to falsify our own history.
Those of us who came from Upplands
Väsby, Högdalen, Brandbergen, Hjulsta,
Vårberg. We could sometimes be called
exotic curiosities, but our experience was
disqualified from the start.
In the anthology Bor vi i samma stad
(Are We Living in the Same City), Iren
Molina describes the consequences of
this situation:
As claimed in postcolonial theory, colonisation
is complete when the subconscious
of the subordinates is penetrated by the
prevailing discourses. This is exactly
what happens in the Swedish problem
suburbs today. When the people living
there apply the prevailing discourses to
describe and explain their own situation,
a form of mental colonisation has taken
place.
Since it still appears that the dominating
opinions on what constitutes a good
urban environment takes inner-city
Stockholm as its reference point, and that
these are the opinions that are usually put
forth, the result is ultimately that it is hard
to see or experience reality in any other
way. The city is divided according to a
strict dichotomy of inner city and suburb.
Since the qualitative norm is based on the
inner city, and the suburb by definition
is not a city, the relationship between
them is unequal in that sense. Postcolonial
and feminist researchers have also
identified that such a division into binary
opposites generates and reinforces social
hierarchies. The inner city and the idea
of urbanity do not necessarily have to be
the given yardstick by which everything
else should be measured, as little as
Western society and maleness need be. In
one of the more interesting contributions
to Färgfabriken’s Stockholm at large,
Handbook on the future of Stockholm,
Lars Reuterswärd, professor and head
of UN-Habitat in Nairobi specialising in
global urbanism, points out that there is
a dearth of theories to make the suburb
visible and describe their specific life
content. Instead, these areas are regarded
from an inner-city perspective and also
as a constant problem. “Urban planners
often claim that the public must be gratified
with the ostensibly sound qualities of
the traditional city.”
The suburbs, i.e. the parts of a city on
the periphery of the centre, are clumped
together and attributed the same epithets
and characteristics. However, this is
only part of the truth, for, as Pär Eliaeson
30 31
states in the foreword to the exhibition
Förorten idag – en annan stad (The
Suburb Today – Another City), which he
produced for Arkitekturmuseet in 1999:
A common denominator for the various
suburbs is the modern urban development
plan, with a spacious positioning
of the tall buildings and a separation of
functions and traffic. The planning and
architecture are often used as an excuse
for the problems in low-status suburbs,
even though the suburbs with a higher
status have the same features. Architects
and others argue that tall apartment
blocks, large neighbourhoods, terse
architecture and purely domestic areas
unfailingly lead to negative social effects
and bad health. The only “worthy” and
“humane” city consists of buildings with
a maximum of five storeys with shops at
street level, laid out in closed blocks that
enable “social control” and “identification”
through a “varied” and “personal”
architecture. The consequence is that the
suburb must be corrected in order to become
a “real city”. Personal preferences
glorified into truth.
The idea that the suburb must be integrated
with the city is troublingly similar
to the perspective on the multicultural
society. Homi Bhabha describes how the
support and encouragement for cultural
diversity in practice counteracts cultural
diversity. He claims that a general norm
arises, instituted by dominating culture,
where the argument appears to be that
“other cultures may all be very well,
but they need to be adapted to our
conditions.” This constitutes what he
describes as creating cultural diversity
while preventing cultural variation.
The relationship between inner city and
suburb has similarities: the suburbs are
fine, but they should be adapted to the
inner city. Instead of having a city where
different forms of urbanisation co-exist,
we get a type of city where something
called the “suburb” may be included in
theory but not in practice, and definitely
not on its own terms. Here, as elsewhere,
the consequence is that certain qualities
are ignored, injustices are created and
resources destroyed or unutilised.