Sand, Seeds, and Soil

When the national mass housing project known as the Million Program was constructed in Swedish cities from 1965 to 1974, the outdoor environments typically remained incomplete. Politicians prescribed national guidelines and regulations that shaped the visions of planners, architects, and landscape architects, rationalizing and standardizing outdoor spaces. These landscapes were soon stigmatized and questioned by media, critics, government officials, and some residents, and hence subject to repeated renovations and transformations. This dissertation investigates such changes and the production of spatial cultures in multi-family housing areas of the Million Program in Holma, Norrliden, and Järvafältet, from the period of their construction to the present day.

With ethnographic and landscape research methods, I investigate case studies through research that explores spatial practices, transnationalism, diasporic cultures, and how people understand their rights to these Swedish landscapes of housing. In addition, I engage with the concept of “welfare landscapes,” signifying how outdoor environments encapsulated the politics of the high welfare state to bring together social welfare and individual wellbeing through design. I offer a new take on this through my notion of “diasporic welfare landscapes,” highlighting migrants’ interventions. Furthermore, I analyze how these landscapes raise questions of materiality, belonging, ecology, and health, and how various municipal planning and regulatory processes function with (or without) resident engagement. The study relies on feminist and architectural theory as well as methods and approaches from cultural and social anthropology.

How have planners, designers, and residents engaged with plants, materials, objects, and politics to transform the landscapes of the Million Program from the 1970s to the present? By analyzing social, spatial, ecological, cultural, and material narratives of these landscapes, this research offers new transformative histories of the welfare landscapes of Sweden through sand, seeds, and soil.

Bio

Chero Eliassi is a landscape architect and, since 2021, a doctoral candidate in Jennifer Mack’s research project “Parks around the Towers” at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). Her research critically investigates the transformation and use of outdoor environments in Sweden’s Million Program multi-family housing areas, constructed between 1965 and 1974, through social, ecological, political, and spatial lenses. 

Eliassi’s doctoral work focuses on case studies in Holma, Norrliden, and Järvafältet that explore spatial practices – such as Newroz, transnationalism, diasporic cultures, and how people understand their rights to postwar Swedish landscapes of housing. Her research employs materials – such as sand, seeds, and soil – as witnesses to trace the evolution of playgrounds, neighborhood parks, and open fields, uncovering the multi-layered histories embedded in these landscapes since their construction. 

Eliassi’s key areas of interest include the emergence of new social, spatial, ecological, cultural, and material narratives within these landscapes. Her work also examines how these diverse outdoor environments contribute to Sweden’s cultural landscapes and can be reimagined as part of its cultural heritage.

Opponent

Huda Tayob is a South African architect and architectural historian and theorist. She is currently a a senior tutor at the Royal College of Arts, London and has previously taught at the University of Cape Town, the University of Johannesburg and the Bartlett School of Architecture. Her research focuses on minor, migrant and subaltern architectures, centred on the African continent and global south. She is co-curator of the open access curriculum Racespacearchitecture.org and a lead curator of the digital exhibition, essay and podcast platform, Archive of Forgetfulness. She participated in the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale (2023) with a project titled Index of Edges which traces watery archives, methods and stories along east African coastal edges from Cape Town to Port Said.

For a copy of the transcript please contact Chero Eliassi chero@kth.se