To Örebro University

A common theme in contemporary Swedish planning discussions is that we no longer meet each other in public spaces. This perceived lack of interpersonal meetings and encounters is said to reinforce the use ofstereotypes and create further distance between differences in the city. The fundamental idea behind this argument is the perception of public space as threatening and insecure, which works as a barrier to the necessary meetings. Consequently, public spaces are rapidly being reconceptualized, redeveloped and repurposed into meeting places. In this conceptualization, the meeting place is intended to generate new social relations that transcend social boundaries and perceptions of belonging, support economic development, and revitalize representative democracy.

This thesis explores the production of public space as meeting place with the aim of critically discussing and nuancing the practices and ideasthat are currently leading this process. Mobilizing the production of space as its theoretical framework and using empirical material collected through interviews, observations, and planning documents from three mid-sized cities in Sweden, this research seeks to understand how the meeting place is conceptualized and how it can be understood within Swedish municipal planning. 

The thesis discusses the discrepancies between vision and practice, abstract and concrete space, by focusing on representations of the meeting place and the practices employed to materialize them. The researchshows that the meeting place in Swedish planning is to be understood as a dominant representation of space, which is represented through the articulation of a specific public while it is building on a consensusoriented production of meaning in a specific material context. This, I argue, contributes to reconceptualizing social problems into questions of form that can be resolved by planning rather than by politics.