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Staden ska funka för alla

What happens if you walk the urban development process backwards, phase by phase, and ask where inclusion and exclusion get designed in?

A City for All: How Could the Approach to Urban Development Evolve Through Universal Design?

The caption board of the Älvstaden city model in Gothenburg, in Swedish, English and braille: This is a model of RiverCity. The white buildings show our intended plans for the area. Scale 1:400. Behind it, the model stretches out with the river in light blue.
The Älvstaden model in Gothenburg, with its caption board in Swedish, English and braille. The white buildings show intended plans: the urban development process, made visible. That process is what this project walked backwards.
Funder
VINNOVA
Period
2020 – 2021
PI
Andreas Johansen (City of Gothenburg, the Real Estate Office)
Coordinator
City of Gothenburg (Fastighetskontoret, the Real Estate Office)
Funding
Funded by VINNOVA: 1,500,000 SEK of a 2.2 MSEK total, under the call Innovations in Universal Design (dnr 2020-00407).

What this project is asking

Staden ska funka för alla was a collaboration between the City of Gothenburg and Certec: a close analysis of the urban development process from a Universal Design perspective. Seven of the city’s administrations and public companies took part, alongside private actors from the construction industry. The goal was stated plainly in the application: examine what Universal Design means for the urban development process, and turn the result into a practical thought support and a scientific article.

The method had a twist I still like: we walked the process backwards. One workshop per main phase, starting at the construction stage and moving back through building permits and detailed planning to the earliest visions. Walking against the current made it easier to see when and where design patterns arise that include or exclude people in everyday life, and what happens in the handover when one set of actors passes the project to the next.

The project is also a link in a chain. It grew from the categorisation research in KatUU, and what we learned here fed directly into The Syntax of Equality and the visualisation project the following year. And it carried the second study of Lilian Müller’s doctoral thesis Bridging the Gaps (2023): the workshops and interviews of this project became three of her five papers.

Method

A multiple case study of the urban development process: one workshop per main phase, run in reverse order from construction to early visions, with semi-structured interviews with civil servants, developers and private actors.

The analysis looked for the moments where Universal Design qualities enter, survive or disappear between phases, and for what supports or impedes them: the material later developed in Papers II, III and V of Müller’s thesis.

Partners

  • City of Gothenburg (coordinator)
  • Lund Municipality (Stadsbyggnadskontoret)
  • Lund University (Certec, Department of Design Sciences)

Co-investigators

  • Per-Olof Hedvall (Lund University, Certec)
  • Lilian Müller (Lund Municipality, industrial PhD student at Certec)

Outputs

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