A walk through Kungsträdgården, and a lesson in public space

As part of the ‘Vision Tent’ — an ongoing student engagement activity within our project — a group of students from an Upper Secondary School in Stockholm joined landscape architect Thorbjorn Andersson for a walk through Kungsträdgården, one of the city’s oldest and most central public parks.

He spoke about the ideas behind the Stockholm School of landscape architecture, and how its parks were designed as “democratic green living rooms,” closely tied to the growth of the Swedish welfare state.

Mid-explanation, Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson happened to walk through the same park, out meeting voters in the final stretch of a tightly contested election campaign, in one of the very spaces Thorbjörn was describing. Sometimes public space does exactly what it’s meant to do!

A small, unplanned moment that captured exactly what the students were there to learn: that public space is where democracy actually happens.