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Pastoral Potemkins:
(Re-)Imagining the Swedish Northern Village

OASE #117, 2024
(essay)

‘The countryside and the village are better at developing the future than the city’. Still from report from Duved on Swedish public television (SVT), June 2022. © Helena Andersson

Norrland’s nine provinces occupy the northernmost 60% of Sweden’s land mass, yet house but 11% of its population. While historically the image of Norrland has oscillated from a cornucopia of endless forests, breath-taking mountains and soils bursting with minerals, to an impoverished, depopulated no-man's land, it is currently being revalued as the epicentre of a Green Transition. Investments are flooding into the region where ‘green’ industries are projected to create 100,000 jobs in the coming decade, inducing a sudden demand for infrastructure, housing, and long-term integration of the labour force.

With these resources comes also a shift in focus in architecture and urban planning. In parallel to smart masterplans, eco-friendly transports and soaring timber structures, spatial practitioners are taking an interest in the northern village as a format for the future. This article will examine how two prominent examples – Duved and Robertsfors – are being (re-)imagined as vessels with the potential to spearhead greater societal transformation. These projections are filtered through three lenses: the project, or the actors and organisation; the prototype, or the innovative initiatives taken within the organising framework; and the model, or the scalable applicability beyond the village. What results are kaleidoscopic images in which we can observe the state of the ‘avant-garde’ in urban and societal development in Sweden and possibly beyond.

PROJECT: DUVED

Located in the picturesque Midwest, a stone’s throw from Sweden’s most beloved ski resort Åre, Duved is a tourist destination in need of attracting permanent residents and stimulate housing construction – today, only 30% of homeowners pay local taxes.¹ In 2017, municipal real estate company Årehus hired a creative director to elaborate on Duved’s capacity to become a trendsetting, self-sustaining community whose residential village feel complements the busier, leisure-oriented Åre. The narrative took flight and has subsequently evolved into Duvedmodellen, short for The Duved Model for Local Communities 2.0, a so-called ‘pilot for future urban planning’ funded by private partners and institutional grants such as Vinnova’s Challenge-Driven Innovation Program worth one million EUR. Structured around the themes of Governance, Housing, Self-provision, Living environment and Digitalisation, a series of ’parallel innovation processes’ prompted by enthusiastic villagers and so-called top creatives alike are expected to generate not only ‘local democracy’ and ’good health’ but an actual ‘global positional switch’ between town and country.² The project’s symbolic culmination will be the Duved Exhibition 2025, echoing the seminal 1930 Stockholm Exhibition that prefigured the functionalist welfare state.

PROTOTYPICAL DUVED

The most mediatised of Duved’s initiatives is the design for Drivhuset – ‘the Hothouse’ – a greenhouse-slash-cultural space and ’philosophical icon’³ signed Shigeru Ban. Saturated renderings portray villagers flocking around origami-like sculptures and tending to an abundant tomato harvest in a Meccano of self-assembled timber frames. Awaiting construction permit in tomorrow’s ‘green village-city‘⁴ are also the Duved 5: five variations on prefab tenement houses devised by, among others, Farshid Moussavi as affordable, locally-produced prototypes for the Swedish housing market. Furthermore, Årehus has financed the launch of Trädgården – ‘The Garden’ – a fine-dining restaurant committed to ‘folk food’⁵ based on a zero-waste, hyper-local food system. Visiting architecture schools⁶ have researched questions of food provision, reuse and flexible housing, and the ‘smart village’ is explored in both academic reports⁷ and hands-on novelties such as the Duved Democracy Tool: a smartphone app simulating a continuous village meeting through interactive map pins.

Undeniably, the sheer number of local initiatives contribute to an overall buzz, but the image of a community-driven ‘innovation cluster’ holds up poorly under closer examination. To date, villagers have not participated in the conception of Drivhuset, whose realisation is stalled by concerns of funding and ownership. The Duved 5 owe their affordability to generous supplier discounts, and their pertinence is disputed since the need for family-friendly detached houses and large apartments outweighs that for small units and ateliers.⁸ Finally, Trädgården’s concept is exemplary but unlikely to survive should the municipal funds subside, and the links between Duvedmodellen’s academic research and on-site interventions appear weak at best.

Interior view of the proposed Hothouse, Shigeru Ban Architects, 2021. © Helena Andersson

THE DUVED MODEL

Individual ventures aside, Duvedmodellen’s core is an ‘innovative collaboration plan’⁹, which supposedly helps villages mobilise their ‘different type of density and speed’¹⁰ and unique proximity to authority in a transition ‘from New Public Management to local network governance’.¹¹ Small communities will thus bring about Folkhemmet 2.0 – ’All People’s Home 2.0’ – a rehash of the post-war welfare state founded on a socialist-capitalist ‘middle way’. Indeed, this background of contemporary network governance discourse and post-war social corporatism consolidates the image of Duvedmodellen as primarily a private-public investment model. Duved Village Council’s 7% of so-called ’golden shares’ in the local development company Duved Framtid AB (‘Duved Future Ltd.’) – meaning that they hold a casting vote in potential board disputes – effectively obscures the underlying commercial interests of both municipal Årehus and its affiliated private investors. Nonetheless, recent accusations of conflicts of interest and failure to conform to the Public Procurement Act levelled against Årehus indicate that the boardroom’s potential as a site for community participation remains debatable.¹²

In 2022, the ’village of the future’ was presented in Brussels during the Festival of the New European Bauhaus.¹³ Indeed, Duvedmodellen’s logotype, inspired by the classic Bauhaus didactical wheel, did prefigure its absorption into the Union’s projet for making our built environment ’beautiful, sustainable, together’. However, despite intentions to make Duved an example for Europe, the final report on ’organisation for local development’ penned by urban consultants Tyréns questions Duvedmodellen’s scalability and transferability, stating that its slim organisation and considerable private capital are hardly compatible with democratic public administration.¹⁴ These findings are mirrored in another report signed the National Board of Housing, Building and Planning, in which interviewees struggle to explain what Duvedmodellen is, does and wants, and illustrate how top-down processes are dressed up as bottom-up initiatives: ’We consider Duved Framtid to be just another exploiter’, and ’some experts from Stockholm came to tell us about Duved – I thought we were the experts’. Most damningly, the report concludes that Duvedmodellen ’gives an illusion of civic participation’ which could ’mislead and thwart development’ and ’undermine trust in societal processes overall’.¹⁵

Notwithstanding, one study undertaken by KTH researchers Ann Legeby and Christina Pech does identify a local social infrastructure of valuable places as well as areas for improvement, and presents an analysis with possibly broader applicability. Contradictory priorities of local stakeholders are brought to light, as well as the fact that binary urban planning categories often overlook the multifunctional performativity of place in a small community. Significantly, the study recognises the influence of urban norms on how ’quality of life’ is evaluated, concluding that Duved’s relatively limited access to housing, services and commerce must be contextualised within the greater Åre area, or the village risks losing its rural character and raison d’être.¹⁶

The original Robertsforsgruppen (Erik Cederquist, Kåge Olsson, Kent Nilsson, Lars Malm) posing in front of a cinder stone barn, Robertsfors, 1970’s. © Helena Andersson

PROJECT: ROBERTSFORS

The image of Robertsfors is less rosy and admittedly more representative of conditions ‘up north’. Both documentary short Diamond People (Sara Jordenö, 2016) and arthouse film Inside the Diamond (Viktor Johansson, 2020) portray a slowly declining community grappling with the 2016 shutdown of its largest employer, synthetic diamond manufacturer Element Six. Fifty years ago, however, the tiny mill town by the Baltic Sea was enjoying a veritable hype on par with Duved’s today.

In 1971, teacher, municipal business secretary, handicraft enthusiast and self-appointed Robertsfors ambassador Erik ‘Jonscha’ Johansson invited himself to the Stockholm art school Konstfack to promote the newly launched municipal company Byalaget AB, ‘The Village Council Ltd.’, commissioning designs from freelancing artists and craftsmen to be manufactured locally and sold in department stores nationwide. His vision – at once passion project and anti-depopulation effort – compelled a group of students to join a guided tour up north, and Byalaget soon grew to engage 35 people. Four graduates left the capital to form the art collective Robertsforsgruppen – ‘The Robertsfors Group’ – later reinforced by design school alumni from far and wide. Supported by Jonscha’s resources and connections, the Group launched craft workshops, music associations and sports teams, and eventually received larger public commissions and exhibitions. Success notwithstanding, the market demand for artisanal goods failed to compensate for dwindling rural subsidies, and the young artists ultimately grew out of their rural co-op. Come the 1980s, the dissolution of both Byalaget and Robertsforsgruppen marked the end of the Robertsfors renaissance.¹⁷

Today, as Robertsfors is set to become a stop on a new railway connecting Norrland’s largest cities, cultural practitioners are invited to partake in a second village revival. In 2022, upon solicitation of the municipality, the Centre for Architecture and Design and the National Heritage Board launched an open call for creative teams to devise strategies for transforming a disused nineteenth-century stable into ‘a vibrant public space that strengthens the site’s and the community’s existing values’. The loosely formulated brief, modest budget and six-month timeframe suggest that the project is intended to inspire future actors and investors rather than physically rehabilitate the site. Consisting of an architect, an antiquarian, an artist-scenographer and a photographer, the selected team has regional roots and shared experience from projects ‘where culture has been the gathering force in a community planning process’.¹⁸ A press photo portrays the team – also calling themselves Robertsforsgruppen – posing confidently in front of the same cinder stone wall as their eponymous predecessors. The name is considered a ‘floating notion’ rather than a specific constellation, and few project goals are set – instead, a ’place for people’s doing over time’ is expected to emerge through ‘site activations’. A cultured yet low-brow attitude emphasizing documentation and community participation permeates the Group’s social media presence, where exhibitions, film screenings and village meetings at the mills are interwoven with archive clippings and current events.

PROTOTYPICAL ROBERTSFORS

Whereas today’s Robertsforsgruppen picks up a legacy, their predecessors actually set an example. Byalaget proposed an innovative model for local artisanal production in an age when government was actively subsidising large-scale urban industry and the relocation of workers from north to south. Jonscha also sought to establish a filial to Konstfack or the Malmsten woodworking school on the former mill grounds – a radical project which attracted a number of collaborators but failed to materialise before the mills were sold off and educational policy became geographically centralising. Another brainchild of Jonscha’s was Robertsfors as Sweden (1978), an itinerant exhibition promoting Robertsfors as the quintessential Swedish village. Featuring pictures by renowned photographer Sune Johnsson as well as art pieces by Robertsforsgruppen it toured the world for four decades before returning home in 2020 – now a time capsule rather than a timely display.¹⁹

Regardless of the fate of the individual initiatives, the overall vision is redeemed by its capacity to inspire action not only in its own time, but in ours. Today’s Robertsforsgruppen might be better equipped to realise Jonscha’s ideas, as the municipality has reacquired buildings abandoned by private businesses, government funds are being reallocated up north, and digitalisation promises to bring remote closer than ever. The question is whether their pledge to ’add new in a non-dominant way’ will suffice to break actual ground.

Instagram post from an exhibition at the barn organised by today’s Robertsforsgruppen, 2023.
© Helena Andersson

THE ROBERTSFORS MODEL

Clever marketing and intricate public-private, rural-urban and cultural-industrial partnerships aside, Jonscha’s interventions appear less as a ready-made strategy than the result of pragmatic intuition. What will become of today’s Robertsforsgruppen’s ambitions for a ‘community-driven cultural heritage site management model’²⁰ remains to be seen, as the project is on-going. Nevertheless, separate attempts at a Robertsfors Model with universal transferability have been made. Back in 2003, a group of community planners and environmental consultants boldly declared that ‘by 2025 the county of Västerbotten, through the pilot municipality of Robertsfors, will be a pioneer of sustainable development,’²¹ prompting an eponymous participatory systems approach to development based on a set of sustainability principles aiming to let ‘humans’, ‘nature’ and ‘society’ thrive within planetary boundaries – principles that, rather than reactions to current conditions, are treated as future success indicators to be reached by way of present action. The model was then globally repackaged as a Municipal Partnership Programme involving hundreds of ’eco-municipalities’.²²

Twenty years later, an almost complete lack of mention of the Robertsfors Model in policy documents indicates that it was short-lived and non-impactful. A 2005 review concluded that while the eco-municipality network did afford a sense of ’being part of a bigger picture’, the model itself failed to bring about meaningful practical or political applications, and was deemed too reliant on tacit knowledge and local enthusiasts to be repeatable elsewhere. Moreover, villagers were confused by the abstract ‘success indicators’: ‘Why not have a smaller goal: to be the least bad? I don’t know what’s more sustainable about being 10,000 vs. 7,000 inhabitants’, as put by a local businessman.²³ A prophetic statement given that today, although Robertsfors still aims to be ‘Sweden’s best municipality’, the sight is set for 2030 and the population goal is lowered to 7,500 – a number not seen since the Jonscha heydays. When a so-called Robertsfors Model is referenced today, it serves to soften the blow of losing the diamond factory and ‘remove obstacles to growth’.²⁴

PROJECTING IMAGES

A key explanation for glaring discrepancies between village visions and realities is neoliberal regional politics which, since the late 1980s, rather than mitigating the effects of urbanisation through rural subsidies and support, puts pressure on regions to generate their own growth. Competing for limited tax incomes, investments and exposure, municipalities are forced to supplement administrative duties with a new role as ‘engines and dynamos’ which ‘shape visions of the future’ and contribute to ‘a more positive image’ of themselves.²⁵ Cultural geographer Ståle Holgersen defines this cycle, in which images crafted on political, trade and industry levels are employed to attract resources which thereafter get ‘trickled down’ to the masses, as a continuous production and distribution of cities (or villages). Through this lens, the image becomes itself a distributive infrastructure, and as long as the production remains unchallenged, change occurs only within the distribution – that is, in the form and content of individual projects.²⁶ The resulting projectism can poignantly be defined as ‘neoliberal charity’, reflecting how rural areas are expected to prove themselves worthy of provisional boosts rather than addressing their systemic disadvantage. As for the effects of this charity, studies on suburban community development projects reveal that these ‘contribute to urban regimes of governance which through democratic games engage the participation of locals and calibrate their activities from conflict-driven to consensus-oriented‘, thereby creating ’poor conditions for critical voices in the urban periphery’.²⁷ Particularly in the case of Duved, the image of the project is the project, judged not by its coherence, quality or likeness to (future) reality, but rather by its capacity to project other images. Confusion and frustration among the villagers indicate that Duved‘s image is being produced neither by nor for them.

PASTORAL POTEMKINS

Duvedmodellen’s imagery embodies the grandiose mashups of UN Sustainability Goals and new public management theory, also known as ‘vision documents’ that Swedish municipalities have been drafting for decades. It is thus no wonder that the project sells. Government institutions allocate funds a priori based on a project’s perceived coherence with a predetermined framework. This funding incentivises private partnerships which in turn embellish new project applications, especially because having once been granted funding an actor is more likely to receive it again, creating a self-affirming logic of le projet pour le projet. Duvedmodellen’s particularly severe case of projectism can be partially attributed to the choice of Jan Åman, a seasoned urban development project leader, as its main storyteller. In 2008, he imagined the city of Östersund as the seat of the New World Bank²⁸; in 2015, the Stockholm suburb of Upplands Väsby was relaunched as ‘a model for all the world‘s municipalities‘²⁹; and when curating the exhibition The Forests of Venice at the 2016 Biennale, the host city was lauded as a ’realised’ utopia.³⁰ A few years later, Duved is being branded as ‘the Williamsburg of Åre Valley’³¹, and Åre positions itself as the ’Davos of the North’.³²

As one would expect in a project cycle of infinite postponement, the interchangeability of place and scale implies that preconceived images are being applied to sites rather than produced with or of them. Significantly, Duvedmodellen’s problem formulations are based on a generalised idea of the declining northern village, while its proposed solutions depend on Duved being a thriving tourist destination in one of Sweden’s youngest, fastest growing and most entrepreneurial municipalities.³³ Furthermore, even if used for stylistic effect, allusions to the city indicate the need to acquire urban traits to become truly relevant; no mention that villagers pride themselves with being ‘non-Åre’.³⁴ This pervasive sense of disconnect forebodes how the project looting tour will move on as soon as financing dries up, leaving Duved behind as a graveyard of abandoned ideas.

Then again, will Robertsfors do better? While painted in different styles, the images of the two villages betray a common subject matter: sites where cherry-picked doers converge to further their tax-subsidised careers until the next opportunity knocks. Nevertheless, Jonscha’s Robertsfors did create a momentary ‘positional switch’ when bringing the village gospel to the city, offering the freshly graduated artists not only a project, but a purpose. Village life became an act of resistance, tapping into contemporary calls for collectivism, anti-authoritarianism, and a ’non-provincial local heritage movement’.³⁵ Although the establishment of a trailblazing artist collective was no strategic goal per se, Jonscha's actions suggest a profound understanding of cultural practice itself as a craft in the artistic, political and economic sense. While a Duvedmodellen 2.0 is highly unlikely, the present iteration of Robertsforsgruppen is a testament to their predecessors’ powerful collective imaginary. Today’s mild and mindful approach is sympathetic enough, but equally demonstrative of a cash-strapped society trying to uphold culture through one-off interventions rather than tenacious political work. The chronic difficulties in securing long-term funding for non-profitable activities doom such endeavours to the project grant loop, whereas ‘culture-driven growth’ remains a euphemism for gentrification. Current Robertsforsgruppen member Johannes Samuelsson admits to having projects ’hi-jacked by rich people’³⁶, just as forty years earlier ceramicist Jonas Lundqvist confessed to ’so-called fancy folk’ being his main patrons.³⁷Today, the ‘fancy folk‘ are well-settled in Duved, where property prices are on par with the wealthy areas of Stockholm, and they will probably arrive at Robertsfors’ new railway station before we know it.

Having compared Duved and Robertsfors, it is clear that although both villages have acted as stepping stones for individual initiatives and entrepreneurs, neither will be the cornerstone of an imminent societal shift. Evidently, the rural renaissance will not depart from the next development project, but from collective visions at once radically local and unapologetically universal. Subsequently, the responsibility of policy-makers and spatial practitioners is not to provide villages with images and doers, but with the productive and distributive infrastructure to actually imagine and do.

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Mia Wahlström and Sarah Bragée, Lokalekonomisk analys för Duved (Tyréns, 2021)
Duvedmodellen website (http://www.duvedmodellen.se, visited 2023-11-08) and Jan Åman, lecture at MTF Labs Aveiro (2022-10-10)
Arvet website, https://www.arvet.se/duved/ (2022), visited 2023-11-08
Karin Berggren, ’Framtiden föds i.byn’, Arkitektur 7 (2022), 36.
Duved Framtid website, https://www.duvedframtid.se/berattelsen/roasted-cauliflower-garlic-dip-ka2tl-bldpc (2021), visited 2023-11-08)
KTH School of Architecture, master studio Housing: Project 4: ‘Circular Duved’ (led by Erik Stenberg and Frida Rosenberg), 2021-2022. Umeå School of Architecture, summer school ‘Duved - the Rural Village as a Catalyst for Future Societies’ (led by Sara Thor), 2021.
Daniel Koch, Digitalisering och landsbygdsutveckling (Stockholm: KTH, 2022)
Sophie Adolphson Jörby, Duvedmodellen: Boverkets utvärdering av steg 2 (Karlskrona: Boverket, 2022)
Björn Hellström, Duvedmodellen för lokalsamhällen: slutrapport steg 2 (Stockholm: Vinnova, 2020)
Björn Hellström, seminar at H22 city fair (2022-06-08)
Paula Westerberg,’Därför ska landsbygden visa vägen för staden’, Dagens Nyheter (2021-11-27)
An internal audit performed in 2023 revealed serious administrative shortcomings but no criminal actions.
Panel discussion: ‘Urban Meets Rural: Place-Based Strategies for the New European Bauhaus’, Festival of the New European Bauhaus, Brussels (2022-06-11)
Mia Wahlström and Madeleine Almqvist, Organisation för lokal utveckling i Duved (Tyréns, 2022)
Adolphson Jörby (2022), pp. 8, 9, 21.
Ann Legeby and Christina Pech, Kartläggning av platsens betydelse (Stockholm: KTH, 2022)
Johannes Samuelsson, Robertsforsgruppen (Umeå: Self-Published, 2020)
Open call application by Maja Hallén, Åsa Hallén, Jenny Nordmark and Johannes Samuelsson, Gemensamt görande – för allmänt bruk (2022)
Funded by the Swedish Institute and Västerbotten Museum, the exhibition originated from a meeting between Jonscha and a visiting Dutch ambassador and was initially intended as a one-off cultural exchange between Robertsfors and Amersfoort. However, it remained en route for decades, showing up in Beijing as well as Daar-es-Salaam, while gradually diminishing in scope. The returning photographs by Sune Jonsson can be found at the Sune Jonsson Centre for Documentary Photography at Västerbotten Museum.
Open call application (2022)
Master thesis by Yury Kazhura, Paulo Bento Maffei de Souza and Heather Worosz, Sustainable Community Development in the Baltic Sea Region (Karlskrona: Blekinge Institute of Technology, 2005)
Torbjörn Lahti and Sara James, The Eco-Municipality Model for Sustainable Community Change: A Systems Approach to Creating Sustainable Communities, https://web.archive.org/web/20080807163009/http://www.wisconsinplanners.org/Ecomunicipalities/EcoMunicipalitySynopsis.pdf (2005), visited 2023-11-08
Kazhura, Maffei de Souza and Worosz (2005)
Robertsfors Municipality website, https://www.robertsfors.se/2015/02/16/februari-robertsforsmodellen/ (2016), visited 2023-11-08
Robertfors Municipality, Sustainable Vision for Robertsfors (Robertsfors: 2016)
Ståle Holgersen, ’Stoppa projektism!’, Stockholmstidningen 1 (2019), 9-11.
Nazem Tahvilzadeh and Lisa Kings, ’Att göra kaos: Om förortspolitiken som urban styrregim och demokratiskt spel’, ARKIV 9 (2018), 104.
Rolf van den Brink,’ Carnegie, Schori och McLaren bygger bank i Östersund’, Dagens Media (2008-07-07)
Väsby promotion, Testlab:”Väsby Bo15 Labs” (2010-10-14)
Svenska Institutet, ’Trä, skog och urbanitet lyfter svensk arkitektur på Venedigbiennalen’, TT (2016-04-26)
The Duved Podcast #11 (2023)
Åre Business Forum website, https://arebusinessforum.se/ (2023), visited 2023-11-08
Wahlström and Bragée (2021)
Koch (2022)
Editor’s foreword, Västerbotten 2 (1979), 73.
Johannes Samuelsson, ’Projekt överallt’, Stockholmstidningen 1 (2019), 12-14.
As quoted in Johannes Samuelsson, Robertsforsgruppen (Umeå: Self-Published, 2020), unpaginated.

Helena Andersson[SE/FR] architect, writer, etc., contact

Helena Andersson^[SE/FR]
architect, writer, etc., contact