Escaping the present-day. Perceptions about order and disorder in the preservation of Gothenburg's allotment gardens

The purpose of this study is to investigate issues concerning the value and significance of the allotment garden, based on different experiences, ideas and perceptions of the gardens by the different parties involved. The future of allotment gardens has largely been settled through negotiations between an allotment association and the local authorities and through these negotiations, the meaning and significance of the allotment gardens has been constructed. In this thesis I want to investigate which ideas and preconceptions about allotments that emerged and became the focal point in these negotiations, and how they affect the everyday practices and aesthetics of the associations member. The empirical data consist of archival documents produced between 1950 - 1980 by the Gothenburg Allotment Association and in meetings between the association and the city of Gothenburg. In these documents different preconceptions about the allotment gardens appearance and constitution regarding “nice” and “ugly”, “order” and “disorder”, “appropriate” and “inappropriate” emerges. The delimitation of the study is a time coincided with a large transformation of Swedish cities. In this transformation many of the actors involved in the planning of the city considered allotment gardens as obsolete and with no discernible value for society and the allotment movement needed to find a new identity for itself in order to survive. The results show that in order to make the allotment gardens a societal concern and preserve them the Gothenburg Allotment Association worked to accommodate the perceptions about them, in which heterogeneousness was equated with disorder and inappropriate while uniformity was equated with order and appropriate. The prerequisite for the preservation of the allotment gardens was not the everyday needs and desires of the association members, but rather in accordance with a notion of how an authentic allotment garden “should” appear.Uppsats för avläggande av filosofie masterexamen med huvudområdet kulturvård 2019, 30 hp Avancerad nivå 2019:2