A popular public sphere: uncovering the making and memories The Swedish People’s Parks

The public sphere is a key geographic dimension of struggles for democracy, and democratic life more broadly. Yet, the nation of a public sphere is aften treated as a spatial metaphor for diffuse conversations. Drawing on critical geographies of social movements as makers of public places, we in this paper turn to the case of the early Swedish labor movements' several hundred so-called People's Parks.
We propose that these parks were created as what might, drawing on Margaret
Kohn, be understood as a "popular public sphere". These public places proved, we suggest, key to Swedish social democracy's decades-long contestation of
hegemony. Unlike many other powerful spaces of political struggle forged in the
same period, these places where not crushed by repression. lnstead, they appear
to have been used as ane of the models for how the welfare state sought to
generate an even more ambitious set of public institutions from the top down.
Gradually undermined by social democracy's turn to state-funded public meeting places, this popular public sphere slowly fell into disarray. With this paper, we propose that uncovering the history of the People's Parks as popular publics prefiguring the welfare state might be an important way to make sense of the memory politics of what today still is a mavement infrastructure, yet remains unmoored from both democratic and social political ambitions.