Salon of trouble: artistic research methods for transformative urban and transport planning
We, Lina Isacs and Gunilla Edemo , collaborate in a joint project where we use arts-based research methods to explore unlearning of taken-for-granted ideas that hinder sustainable transition in urban and transport planning, and to search for alternatives. Together with the Swedish Public Arts Agency and Moderna Dansteatern on Skeppsholmen in Stockholm, we organise four salons where public officials, artists and researchers meet for joint reflection, existential conversations and artistic creations under the guidance of process leader Pernilla Glaser. Art speaks to sensuality, emotions and not-knowing, challenging the dominant view of what kind of knowledge is right and important for understanding and changing the world. In the salons, we particularly want to challenge what I call economism, the mix of ideas and practices that characterises social planning and management today and which idealises a narrow form of rationality, measurability in money and “economic efficiency” and therefore makes invisible what cannot be measured. An important driving force behind our project is the “attrition” (in Swedish skav) that civil servants (like many others) experience over the fact that economistic ideas make it difficult to consider nature, long term perspectives and transformation. I feel that attrition too. From my perspective and that of many other critical researchers (read more about my background below), economism is partly related to the strong status that neoclassical economics has and has long had as an expert science in public administration and which, despite long-standing criticism, reaches more and more policy areas. Together with the salon participants as co-researchers, I want to use our common ground constructively to be able to “think and do new”, beyond the neoclassical heritage but also beyond the common criticism of it.
Four of TRANSPLACE's five practice partners participate in the project: Huddinge Municipality, Botkyrka Municipality, the Stockholm Region and the Swedish Transport Administration. Employees from them actively participate in the salons as co-researchers.
