Välfärdssamhällets vardagslandskap. Everyday environments of the welfare state

Today, the everyday environments of the welfare state are receiving ever more attention from scholars across a range of disciplines. Until recently, many outdoor environments were criticised for being anything from badly planned and planted or poorly designed, to being too vast and barren. Yet today these environments form the basis for studies in fields such as comparative literature, cultural geography, architectural history and landscape planning. The environments are viewed as the results of political choices and democratic decisions; as manifestations of contemporaneous attitudes to children or of the relationship between people and their outdoor environment; or as forms of architectonic expression, but also as heritage worth discussing and appraising in a contemporary perspective, and even as places that may conceivably be preserved. Today, many of these places require major renovation; others were altered almost as soon as they were created. Others still are being densified to increase living space per cubic metre, as with the Plankan block at Södermalm in Stockholm, for example. Moreover, we are now seeing a gradual shift away from regarding everything of the period as a homogeneous mass, without specific expression, to a situation where individual environments can be successfully examined and discussed, looking at how they were intended to function and influence the people who used them, who planned them, and the rationale and ideas that informed the work.The aim of this issue of the Nordic Journal of Settlement History and Built Heritage is to show that the everyday landscape of the welfare state can be examined and discussed using various interfaces and perspectives, primarily from the starting point of the situation in Sweden and Finland in the period c.1940 to the present day