Teaching a Seminar at the School of Architecture in KTH: New Peripheries, New Centers. A Visual Map

New Peripheries, New Centers focuses on the spaces inhabited by minority communities that contest contemporary and dominant narratives in Sweden. The course proposes to construct a visual map analyzing daily-life objects, interior spaces and urban contexts not included in normative discourses, policies and practices. Among others, case studies include women’s associations building new rooms for solidarity and sisterhood; migrant families inhabiting domestic settings of the Million Programme; second-generation teenagers occupying public spaces; and indigenous communities proposing a different form of territorial organization.

Meeting place for women with diverse backgrounds, "K.O.K. (Women Desire Collectivity). Project: Petra Bauer and Jenny Richards. Photo: Tensta Konsthall.

The seminar offers a series of theoretical discussions and workshop sessions with experts to advance a common vocabulary on inclusion, diversity, integration, and accessibility. Working in groups, students will research, analyze and document the spatial implications of a minority group in Sweden. Through collecting data, surveying spaces and interviewing the different agents involved in the site, students will propose a visual map with the ambition to create alternative narratives, protocols and design strategies. The seminar’s goal is to discuss possible opportunities for spatial re-appropriation, re-occupation and re-inhabitation by those communities under struggle.