From grassroots commons in crisis to urban, public places? The Swedish People's parks in the long downturn of organized labor

Seemingly neglected post-industrial spaces have often become crucial assets for movements seeking to inscribe new commons and public places in the urban fabric. Appropriating abandoned "Brachen" landscape or older factory complexes has allowed movements a foothold to build an urban world that is theirs. However, also movements clearly connected to industrialization, most notably the labor movement, crafted urban, public geographies that have often been left in disarray by post-industrial abandonment. Scrutinizing the partial demise and current life of the many hundreds of People's Parks built by organized labor throughout Sweden during the 20th century, we in this presentation ask how an increasingly weaker labor movement's public infrastructure has been re-interpreted in the last four decades. In particularly we want to consider how ever-weaker grassroots geographies of commoning are today reinterpreted as public in new ways, but also how they fare as local articulations of public heritage and the ways in which political memories at these sites can resurface in contentious manners.