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2001-2006: Enacting demographic competitiveness

Enacting demographic competitiveness

Springtime in Vinterland

In April 2002 the temporary management group, Projekt Folkets park, took control over the park’s maintenance and renewal. In the years that followed, this group of municipal bureaucrats was involved in a series of projects increasingly explicitly aimed at making Folkets park, and Malmö more generally, more demographically

‘attractive’. This group did neither, as the last chapter has shown, have a clear political mandate to focus on creating regionally attractive space nor increase of the influence of commercial forces in the park. Both ideas about commercialization and regional competition, however, soon came to the fore in the park’s renewal again. An important precursor to Folkets park’s mid-2000s turn back towards demographic competition, but to a much lesser extent the related issue of commercialization, was however led by a different group of bureaucrats.

This other project began taking shape in May 2001 — that is, before the consultant-led subcommittee’s ‘entertainment center’ renewal plan had been exposed to the criticism that would lead to its revision in November the same year.

At the monthly meeting of the Technical Council, a group of planners proposed that Malmö’s municipality should engage itself further in celebrating the holiday season. The traditional Christmas markets and decorative lights lining the city’s main shopping streets were to be bolstered with a new way to attract shoppers and tourists to the city for the holidays, and Folkets park was suggested as the site for

this project.416 This idea of using Folkets park for municipal Christmas celebrations had two months before this been raised in the subcommittee’s discussions about attracting new groups to the park.417 The idea was, then, from its inception shaped by notions of regional competitiveness, but became wrapped up in the social concerns with local matters that came to dominate the political debate about the ‘entertainment center’ plan.

Specifically, the Street and Parks Department suggested trying a new ‘concept’

that would stand out among the many other Christmas events hosted by the region’s municipalities and businesses. This rather vaguely defined concept solidified as Vinterland (‘Winterland’), an extensive outdoor performance arranged in Folkets park during the last two weeks of December 2001 and repeated in the five winters that followed. Vinterland was designed to have ‘beautiful, exciting lighting and decorations’ and dramatic shows with ‘winter characters’

making appearances in the park.418 ‘All venues and existing businesses’ were to be

‘developed’ alongside ‘outdoor events’ to enable ‘original experiences’ and

‘traditional’ Christmas activities.419 Since Vinterland was organized by a temporary group independent of the new management, its mandate was more open and the project could focus on regional competition in a moment when the management group had been explicitly asked to de-emphasize this issue. The park’s formal management’s gradual turn to regional competition was for these reasons largely informed by how representations of local uses articulated with more abstract planning visions of attractive space in the Vinterland project’s first few years.

The first Vinterland memo, presented in May 2001 for the Technical Council, echoed the approach to planning which permeated the Bo01 project and the 2000 Comprehensive Plan. This document focused on the physical, aesthetic properties of the park’s built environment. The memo argued that Folkets park’s ‘beautiful scenery’, ‘good venues’, and existing ‘technical infrastructure’ were the most important place-specific preconditions for locating Vinterland in Folkets park.420 As this attractiveness-through-aesthetics paradigm migrated across the city from the Bo01 expo it articulated with the park’s rich history of detailed representations, including the torrent of critical comments the 2001 subcommittee plan faced for its

416 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Minutes of Tekniska nämnden 29th May 2001 §109,

‘Förslag till vinteraktiviteter i Folkets park’, p. 1.

417 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Minutes of Tekniska nämnden 26th February 2001 § 50,

‘Malmö Folkets park – ett upplevelsecentrum i en expanderande region, utredning om Malmö Folkets park, Remissutgåva 2001-02-19’, p. 42.

418 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Minutes of Tekniska nämnden 29th May 2001 §109,

‘Förslag till vinteraktiviteter i Folkets park’, Gatukontoret Malmö stad, 2001, p 2-3.

419 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Minutes of Tekniska nämnden 29th May 2001 §109,

‘Förslag till vinteraktiviteter i Folkets park’, 2001, p. 2

420 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Minutes of Tekniska nämnden 29th May 2001 §109,

‘Förslag till vinteraktiviteter i Folkets park’, p. 2.

proposed turn to commercial approaches. Folkets park was ‘visited by all kinds of Malmö residents with their different [ethnic] backgrounds’, the memo introducing the Vinterland project argued. Vinterland could thus make use of this established pattern of use that constituted the park as a transcultural ‘meeting place’, a term that just had begun to be used to understand patterns of use in Malmö’s urban planning documents.421 During this darkest and coldest part of the winter season, when ‘natural meeting places’ in public space were used to ‘a lesser degree’, the park still acted as a nodal point connecting different groups in the city through an intense and diverse culture of everyday use. Folkets park was, then described as more than a formally-designated public space, but was represented as an urban common constituted by everyday uses. The park was a rare kind of place in the city, where Malmö’s residents felt that they could ‘simply be’ without having to pay an entrance or feel forced to buy food or drinks.422 In sharp contrast to Bo01, this representation of intense and complex everyday uses was the main resource mobilized in the Vinterland project’s visions.

Folkets park’s everyday uses were represented as more than the kind of recreational visits by locals that the 1991 decision had designated the park for. The idea of everyday use by particular demographics being connected to different functions — a theme increasingly important in the park’s renewal from mid 1990s, culminating in the 2001 subcommittee´s ‘entertainment center’ plan — was again mobilized in the Vinterland project. Folkets park’s ‘long tradition of entertainment activities’ was thus described as more than a distant past that could be recalled in nostalgic marketing schemes for Vinterland. This history was represented as a residual pattern of use persisting in the present, with the memo noting that people were still travelling from beyond the immediate neighborhood to visit the park.423

In the Vinterland project, as in the ‘regional entertainment center’ plan, the link between regional visitors and the park’s entertainment functions became a way to regulate patterns of use and users indirectly through spatial renewal. Vinterland’s temporary and modest tweaking of public space was in this sense understood to have potentially profound effects on mundane patterns of use, providing an alternative model for attractive space to Bo01’s subsidized residential units. The most important difference between how these issues were phrased in the subcommittee’s plan and the Vinterland project was that the latter introduced a vision of competing for visitors to Folkets park and Malmö from the city’s

‘hinterland’ that did not rely on market forces as sources of spatial

421 Mukhtar-Landgren, Planering för framsteg och gemenskap: om den kommunala utvecklingsplaneringens idémässiga förutsättningar, p. 167

422 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Minutes of Tekniska nämnden 29th May 2001 §109,

‘Förslag till vinteraktiviteter i Folkets park’, p. 1,2.

423 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Minutes of Tekniska nämnden 29th May 2001 §109,

‘Förslag till vinteraktiviteter i Folkets park’, p. 2

attractiveness.424 The vision was then not, unlike the subcommittee’s plans, to support the city’s private entertainment firms as a resource for a coming post-industrial economy, and in the process boost municipal revenue rent streams from the park. Instead, the municipality’s direct intervention in space was to reinforce a regional pattern of use that was taken to strengthen Malmö’s ‘profile’, in the long run, making suburban residents more prone to visit the city ‘at all times of the year’.425

By connecting this regional pattern of use to free public entertainment, rather than to the commercialization of the park, the contradiction that had undone the subcommittee’s ‘entertainment center’ plan was subtly framed in a less volatile way. The turn towards attracting regional visitors was thus set up as a technical problem of people in public space, rather than supporting commercial forces as a function linked to regional visitors. New groups of users were to be added through new functions in the park as a public space, rather than a commercial renewal that limited existing functions and risked undermining existing patterns of use, which created the very valuable sense of place to ‘simply be’ in.

Folkets park was, in this memo’s vision, primarily to remain a Community Park, with Vinterland temporarily adding a new layer of use and users to this fundamental function.426 This concern with treading gently is clearly visible in several aspects on the work on the project. For instance, there was next to no Christian mythology, like Santa Clauses or nativity scenes, used in the Vinterland performances, in what must be understood as an attempt not to exclude residents from the ethnically diverse neighborhood’s religious minorities that planners understood was a substantial part the park’s everyday visitors. After some discussions, an entrance fee was ruled out in order to ensure that the park remained accessible to all, regardless of income.427 ‘The park should be perceived to be for the common people’ as the Vinterland group made clear in their memo, connecting their vision to the park’s history.428 Reframing demographic competition as a matter of competing for everyday users of public space defused the tensions between commercial-regional and recreational-local uses that had upended the subcommittee’s ‘entertainment center’ plan, and Vinterland was approved by the Technical Council in May 2001. Still, the underlying contradiction between how

424 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Minutes of Tekniska nämnden 29th May 2001 §109,

‘Förslag till vinteraktiviteter i Folkets park’, p. 2.

425 P. 2; Malmö stad, Kommunfullmäktiges arkiv, Minutes of Malmö kommunstyrelsen 6th September 2001, §324 ‘Förslag till vinteraktiviteter i Folkets Park’, no pagination. [2].

426 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Minutes of Tekniska nämnden 29th May 2001 §109,

‘Förslag till vinteraktiviteter i Folkets park’, p. 2.

427 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Minutes of Tekniska nämnden 29th May 2001 §109,

‘Förslag till vinteraktiviteter i Folkets park’ p. 4; Malmö stad, Kommunfullmäktiges arkiv, Minutes of Malmö kommunstyrelsen 6th September 2001, §324 ‘Förslag till vinteraktiviteter i Folkets Park’, no pagination. [2].

428 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Minutes of Tekniska nämnden 29th May 2001 §109,

‘Förslag till vinteraktiviteter i Folkets park’, p 3.

the project was to focus its resources would resurface in new forms. Tension around who was to be included and excluded from the park would force itself into plain view, with disruptive effects, and Vinterland’s careful separation of commercial forces from attractive space would come to express contradictions in new ways.

Un-entrepreneurial entrepreneurs as a neoliberal problem

The collected papers of the Vinterland working group are, unlike several similar temporary projects, stored in a municipal archive. This means that the way in which the planners navigated the contradictions the project was entangled with can be investigated in more detail compared to similar renewal projects. Among these papers the formal evaluations of the project are particularly interesting. This paperwork includes detailed notes taken at a debriefing of the park’s various entrepreneurs, but also the crew of magicians, storytellers, fire-eaters, acrobats and actors playing characters such as ‘King Winter’, ‘The Snow Queen’, ‘The Ice Sisters’ and ‘The Winter Elf.’ These ethnographic representations are bolstered by surveys such as a statistical report on the 2001 Vinterland event showing the enthusiastic reception of the public, estimated as twice the expected 40,000 visitors.429

The contradiction that these early planning documents most clearly articulated was not between different groups of users. Few concerns over attracting suburban visitors can, in fact, be found among the 2001 Vinterland papers when compared to the ambition of the project’s first memo from May the same year. The most probable explanation for this turn to local users of the park is the fierce critique that the consultant-led subcommittee’s vision of regional competitiveness through commercialization had faced during the fall of 2001. To this one should add the public debate about the failure of drawing affluent residents to the Bo01 project, despite funneling millions from municipal, state, EU, and labor movement-aligned cooperative funds into the project, reaching a climax during the summer and fall of 2001.

Instead, it was Folkets park’s commercial interests that were the main cause for concern in the 2001 Vinterland evaluation. The subcommittee’s ‘entertainment center’ plan had assumed that the park’s entrepreneurs would seize any

429 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Blue folder marked Vinterland 2001, ‘Vinterland program 13-30 december’, Malmö stad, 2001, no pagination [2]; Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Blue folder marked Vinterland 2002, ‘Projektbeskrivning Vinterland 2002’, Malmö stad, 2001, no pagination [1].

opportunity to increase their customer base and play a crucial but indirect role in a common effort to attract new visitors. Vinterland’s focus on direct municipal intervention in public space did not cast the park’s commercial leaseholders in this important role. Still, the Vinterland team appeared to be taken by surprise when it turned out that these firms were fundamentally unconcerned with contributing to the municipality’s efforts to make more visitors, and potential customers, feel at home in the park during the winter of 2001.

Representations of mundane matters, like actors’ access to dressing rooms, toilets, and heated space for taking breaks, illustrated serious problems undermining the entire Vinterland project. While some activities — like theatre plays, circus acts, and open mic sessions — took place inside those of Folkets park’s otherwise rarely-used buildings controlled by Malmö municipality, the Vinterland performances were principally geared at creating outside scenes, with the winter characters moving around in the festively-decorated park and interacting with the public. This meant that actors — in their imaginative but not necessarily warm fairytale outfits — were exposed to the damp and cold Malmö winter for extended periods.430 Most of the almost a dozen ‘good venues’ that the municipality owned in Folkets park, mentioned in the 2001 May Vinterland memo, were in fact leased by private firms that could chose not to cooperate with the project. Particularly important was that Malmö’s Real Estate Department since 1991 had leased Moriskan and Amiralen, the park’s two biggest venues, at highly subsidized rates to private firms — by 2001 the Profilrestauranger AB corporation that a few years before had bought the leases from the Provobis corporation.431 The Vinterland team could only find one tiny free space for the twenty or so actors to warm up in, go to the bathroom, or change into their work outfits. This changing room which the municipality temporarily borrowed was in Amiralen’s basement, a building the municipality had been leasing at substantial yearly losses to Profilrestauranger for ten years. How un-eager Profilrestauranger was to cooperate with Vinterland was not only illustrated by their unwillingness to lend a more substantial room to their landlords, but by the fact that they refused to give out more than one key to the basement changing room. The complicated instructions that explained how this single key was to be shared between the workers covered an entire typed A4 page.432

430 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Blue folder marked Vinterland 2002, ‘Snödrottningen’, Malmö stad, 2002, no pagination [2].

431 Initially as Provobis, a Procordia subsidiary, which was reconstructed as the independent firm Profilrestauranger in the fall of 2000 and a year later reported an astounding one bn SEK turnover.

Patent och registreringsverket, Årsredovisning för profilrestauranger AB, 2001.

432 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Blue folder marked Vinterland 2001, ‘Bra att veta om du vill byta om, pausa, värma er och…’, Malmö stad, 2002.

Access to indoor space was represented as a serious problem for both the public and Vinterland employees throughout the debriefing reports.433 The indoor theatre scene’s performances were overcrowded and plays were even interrupted as visitors ceaselessly sought to escape the cold winter weather by sneaking into the warmth — without waiting until the plays had ended.434 To preempt this problem, Vinterland had made a deal to borrow Moriskan’s large lobby, where guests could warm up while looking at a gingerbread house competition on display. The informal agreement to rent this small part of the much larger building to the Malmö municipality during the Vinterland project was cancelled for unknown reasons. The competition was at the last minute moved to a building the municipality was leasing to The Children’s Theatre Hall, a more cooperative non-profit theatre group, which in turn lead to actors’ complaints of overcrowding and interruptions.435

Profilrestauranger was also disinterested in keeping their restaurants in Moriskan and Amiralen open for the large crowds that visited the park during Vinterland. The firm had a business model that focused on profitable pre-paid set dinners and shows, and their two venues were in fact closed to the public as Vinterland was going on just outside.436 This lack of interest in commercial opportunities can be explained in terms of a clause in the 1991 lease for Amiralen and Moriskan that Profilrestauranger’s precursor Provobis had signed with the desperate Real Estate Department, seemingly at the advice of the Quist AB consultancy. The 1991 contract stipulated that Profilrestauranger only pay 8% of its turnover from the two venues as rent. Any extension of Moriskan or Amiralen’s opening hours beyond set dinner and ticketed events meant guaranteed increases in staff and rent costs, which would have to be recapped with the very much less guaranteed revenue in order not to eat into Profilrestauranger’s comfortable profits. Ending the disastrous 1991 contract, which invited this kind of cherry-picking in the way Amiralen and Moriskan were used, had turned out to be difficult. The Real Estate Department’s attempt to find better tenants through the

433 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Blue folder marked Vinterland 2002, ‘Snörprinsarna’, Malmö stad, 2002, no pagination [1]; Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Blue folder marked Vinterland 2002, ‘Rita Reflex & Kira Kristall’, Malmö stad, 2001, no pagination [2]; Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Blue folder marked Vinterland 2002, ‘Utvärdering Vinterland från Barnen Scen’, Malmö stad, 2002, no pagination [1].

434 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Blue folder marked Vinterland 2002, Vinterland 2002, Malmö stad, 2002, no pagination [2].

435 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Blue folder marked Vinterland 2001, Arrangemangen Vinterland 2001, Malmö stad, 2001, no pagination [2]; Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Blue folder named Vinterland 2001, ‘Vinterland program 13-30 december’, Malmö stad, 2001, no pagination [2]; Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Blue folder marked Vinterland 2002,

‘Utvärdering Vinterland från Barnen Scen’, Malmö stad, 2002, no pagination [1].

436 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Blue folder marked Vinterland 2001, ‘Protokoll: Malmö stads arrangemang Vinterland i Malmö Folkets park 2001-12-12-2001-12-30, protokoll fört vid möte ang Vinterland den 2001-11-08’, no pagination [3].

Amiralen school project in the late 1990s had failed, and an attempt to start a municipal art museum in the same building as a pretext to get rid of the leaseholders had been dismissed by politicians uneager to spend more public money on art.437

Also the 2001 evaluation documents for Vinterland represented Profilrestauranger’s business strategy as a serious obstacle for realizing their visions. This document explicitly stated that the park’s businesses in general, and Profilrestauranger in particular, showed little interest in cooperating with the Vinterland organizers. Rather than the development resource the market had been framed as in the subcommittee’s ‘entertainment center’ plan just months before, the actual market was turning out to be the biggest problem for the Vinterland project’s otherwise successful attempt to bring more people to the park during its cold winter season.

The same kind of tension — between uninterested leaseholders and frozen visitors — returned in 2002 as the project was renewed for a second season despite this one serious problem. The owners of Folkets park’s hotdog stands, candy stores and restaurants remained largely indifferent to this potential opportunity to reach more customers, and there was genuinely very little the Vinterland organizers could do about it, despite their best efforts to enthuse business owners.

Mundane tensions between the Vinterland team and the park’s firms continued, with the unwillingness of market forces to provide visitors with food and shelter from the cold being a regular point of frustration in the management group.

Vinterland’s project managers lamented that commercial ‘actors in the park aren’t using their space’ and that the selection of food provided by commercial forces was poor. Based on these representations of un-entrepreneurial entrepreneurs, the municipal bureaucrats argued that it was crucial to find and invite other food stall vendors with more exciting products than the standard fast food that the park’s businesses offered.438

The papers found in the Vinterland archives are somewhat unclear about whether Profilrestauranger’s restaurant in Moriskan were open to the public on some of the Vinterland evenings in 2002 or not. From the printed Vinterland programs for the following years it is however certain that none of

437 Malmö stad, Kommunfullmäktiges arkiv, Minutes of Malmö Kommunstyrelse 6th mars 2002 §95

‘Reservation (M), Omorganisation av verksamheten i Folkets park’.

438 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Blue folder marked Vinterland 2003, Reflektioner Vinterland 2002, Malmö stad, 2003, no pagination [2]; Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Blue folder marked Vinterland 2002, Arrangemangsenhetens interna utvärdering 2001, Malmö stad, 2002, no pagination [1]; Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Blue folder marked Vinterland 2003, Muntlig utvärdering av Vinterland 2002 14/1-03, Malmö stad, 2003, no pagination [2-3];

Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Blue folder marked Vinterland 2003, Vinterland – utvärdering av Vinterland 19 dec – 6 jan 2003/2004, Malmö stad, 2004, no pagination [2]; Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Blue folder marked Vinterland 2005, Vinterland 04/05 i Malmö Folkets park (project description), Malmö stad, 2002, no pagination [2].