Urban Cemeteries and the Aesthetics of Care

Even though urban cemeteries in Sweden today can be seen as making space for different memorial practices, they are also a materialization of certain cultural and religious norms (Kjaersgaard & Venbrux, 2016), which sometimes are expressed as functional and aesthetic values. In this respect, the urban cemetery has an abiding attitude to change in building on past traditions and designs to address the needs of present and future generations (cf. Brady, 2021). At the same time, urban cemeteries are also places where social and cultural change become insistently noticeable and tangible, creating both conflicts and an acceptance of each other’s differences (cf. Swensen & Skår, 2019).

The aesthetics of the urban cemetery hence reflects views on how people, communities, and society at large make space in the city for diverse life worlds and temporalities (cf. Foucault, 1986). Nature, as it is framed in urban cemeteries, is sometimes viewed as a common symbolic resonance – as an expression of the eternal cycle of life and death. But negative aesthetic experiences of the ugliness in nature (cf. Brady, 2010) may also point to the precariousness of life, by revealing existential matters such as loss and oblivion (Petersson et al., 2018).

Urban cemeteries can be seen both as ‘fields of care’ and ‘public monuments’ in Tuan’s (1974) sense of the terms. By expanding the concept of an ‘aesthetics of care’ (Petersson & Wingren, 2011; Lehtinen, 2020) to include both communicative and cultural memory (Assman, 2008), the intergenerational aspect of urban cemeteries could be reconsidered, taking sustainable aesthetics and existential sustainability into account. As human existence is reaching a crisis in terms of nature, climate, and health, places where existential matters are cared for may have an important influence not only on our wellbeing but also on our ethical thinking and acting (cf. Butler, 2004).