This series of public seminars explores and develops new thinking around the practical, spatial, and aesthetic forms needed for co-creation as part of locally grounded justice practices.
Urban justice links principles of social justice to the spatial organisation of cities. It examines how power, resources, rights, and opportunities are distributed across space, and how these arrangements reflect, reproduce, or challenge structural inequalities. It also foregrounds cities as sites of mnemonic and representational injustice, where interpretative prerogatives are unevenly distributed among citizens. What would it mean to take seriously the idea that justice depends on people’s capacity to articulate themselves—not in the abstract, but from within their situated conditions?
Community and place shape our capacity to express, act, and create. By relating questions of creativity, materiality, and expression to space, the seminars examine the roles, approaches, and practices of artists, architects, curators, researchers, organisers, and others. But what does it take not only to open spaces, but to sustain them as sites of encounter across difference, conflict, and unequal power? How can such spaces enable people to articulate and contest shared circumstances, give form to experience, and develop forms of action that do not smooth over difference but work through it? Rather than assuming common ground, we ask how spaces can hold the ongoing negotiation of who “we” are—and who gets to decide.
We build on ongoing discussions across fields such as socially engaged art, feminist and decolonial studies, focusing on participatory practices, sharing authority, and other collaborative forms of co-producing knowledge and meaning more justly. The seminars extend these discussions into processes of actual space-making, engaging the concrete urban fabric and the layered social relations through which it is produced and lived. In this sense, the work is not only discursive but spatial: an attempt to create and sustain spaces that can hold difficult conversations without foreclosing them.
Such spaces require a willingness to remain with tension and discomfort—and to understand co-creation as an ongoing, collective practice sustained over time. They also invite us to consider art and architecture not simply as representational forms, but as practices that organise affect and movement, and actively shape the conditions of shared life.
This spatial turn shifts attention from representation alone to the production and organisation of social relations through spatial practice and the divisions of labour that sustain them. It positions art and material culture as practices that support human relationships, while framing urban imaginaries and world-making as outcomes of concrete labour unfolding in concrete space.
The forms we seek to create are, in many ways, impossible to fully stabilise. Opening and holding a space in which people can freely express and explore is inherently contradictory. By invoking justice as an impossible form, we emphasise that achievements in its name are always partial, temporary, and in need of continual work, maintenance, and renewal. Our ambitions are conditioned by the unequal contexts in which they emerge—contexts in which participation itself can be depoliticised and absorbed into the logics of the neoliberal city. This perspective moves beyond the polarity between art’s autonomy and responsibility, unsettling the notion of socially engaged art as intrinsically emancipatory and reframing it instead as a contested field whose transformative potential depends on how practices are organised.
In this sense, the impossible form names both the difficulty of the project and its necessity: the need to create forms that sit uneasily within, and actively press against, existing urban and institutional arrangements. It displaces technocratic solutionism by foregrounding practices that remain open to uncertainty—refusing to pre-emptively stabilise meaning and instead working within the indeterminacy of the not-yet-known. It calls on us to stay with this tension, and to attend to the temporalities of justice—not as events, but as ongoing processes of negotiation, repair, and struggle.
Articulating justice as an impossible form, we ask: what if justice is not a state to be achieved, but a slow, incomplete, and ongoing process sustained through spaces, relations, and shared practices? What if understanding creativity as concrete labour carried out in specific places allows us to pose new questions about power and to explore alternative arrangements? And what if processes of world-making change as labour is contested, reorganised, and redistributed?
Activities:
The series convenes three exploratory workshops in autumn 2026:
- 27–28 August 2026, (27 August at Kristianstadsgatan 16 // 28 August at Slottsgatan 33): What Holds in the In-Between?
- 21–22 October 2026, (venue in Malmö TBA): A Space Called Free
- 9–10 December 2026, Hägerstensåsens medborgarhus: Justice Still Not Settled
Each workshop is structured to bring keynote perspectives by specially invited international speakers into dialogue with participants’ contributions, and explicitly invites both paper presentations and practice-based work, including artistic and curatorial interventions and ways of inquiring.
Across the workshops, participants will share original work, including critical reflections and interventions. The group will continue to exchange in 2027, with the aim of developing these contributions into a collaboratively authored volume.
Registration
Participation in the workshops is free of charge, but registration is required due to limited capacity. Registration links and practical information can be found at the event links above.
About the project
The series of public seminars brings together a growing group of spatial practitioners—from research, the arts, architecture, activism, and community organising—who meet over time to develop both thinking and practice around co-creation as a spatial practice in support of justice-oriented projects. Through public talks and ongoing exchange, participants engage with one another’s work and contribute to the development of a joint publication.
The series is part of a long-term collaboration between the Institute for Urban Research (IUR) and the Public Art Agency Sweden (PAA), aimed at advancing urban humanities as a field of critical spatial practice, and deepening the discourse and practice around artistic and curatorial processes as spatial and socially engaged practices in dialogue with societal change.
The project is convened by:
Annika Enqvist, Curator, Public Art Agency Sweden
Robert Nilsson Mohammadi, Senior Lecturer and Research Coordinator for Urban Humanities, Institute for Urban Research (IUR), Malmö University
Speakers include:
Ulf Aminde, artist and Professor of Performative Spaces, weißensee kunsthochschule berlin
Ana Betancour, Associate Professor, Malmö University
Erling Bjørgvinsson, Design Researcher, University of Gothenburg
Sebastian Dahlqvist, artist and artistic and executive director, Hägerstensåsens medborgarhus
Maryam Fanni, PhD in Design, independent researcher
Julie Goodrich, Institute for Urban Research (IUR), Malmö University
Hanna Henryson, Associate Professor, Stockholm University
Sandi Hilal, architect, artist, and educator; co-founder of DAAR – Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency
Adam Lundberg, Postdoctoral researcher, Institute for Urban Research (IUR) at Malmö University
Sara Nilsson Mohammadi, PhD Candidate, Department of School Leadership
Shuyu Chen, architect, curator and founder of PEACHCOLONY, a shop and curatorial agency in Möllan, Malmö
Jane Rendell, Professor of Critical Spatial Practice, University College London (UCL)
Meike Schalk, Professor in Urban Design and Urban Theory, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm
Cecilie Sachs Olsen, Professor of Art and Society, Oslo Metropolitan University
Heidi Svenningsen Kajita, Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen
Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe, Professor, Linköping University
Affiliation and participation
The series combines invited contributors with a broader network of affiliated participants. Researchers, artists, architects, curators, organisers, and others interested in the themes of the project are welcome to participate in individual workshops and public events.
There will also be opportunities to affiliate with the broader network developing around the project and to take part in ongoing exchanges connected to future activities and publications.
The organisers particularly welcome contributions engaging questions of spatial practice, urban justice, memory, co-creation, public art, architecture, and place-based forms of inquiry.
