Life, with the garden
Location: Stockholm, Sweden • • • Visit: Summer & autumn 2020 • • • Written in October 2020
Yesterday I led the last interview for my study with forest owners about place meanings. I focused on the Swedish idea of “hembygdskänsla”. It is a word that doesn’t have a good translation into English, its meaning is similar to sense of home, but more. “Bygd”, which makes up the middle part, is a loosely defined area, a district, a parish. “Hembygd”, then, is the general area where home is. And what I’ve realized throughout these interviews is that how people understand their sense of home, their “hembygdskänsla”, varies. More than I expected. The nuances will be challenging to capture in the square, restricted format of a scientific paper. I look forward to start digging into the data.
My “hembygdskänsla” right now is focused on Bagarmossen, the neighborhood that I moved back to a year ago. I grew up here. My dad still lives here, and my mom also lives close by. I know the trails in the neighboring forest like the back of my hand. But it has also changed since my teens. In the early 2000s, it could be a bit rough. Now, community gardens have popped up between the apartment buildings, small shops around the newly renovated square, a bakery with amazing buns. A collective bike workshop. Is it contributing to gentrification if you move back to the place where you grew up? I don’t know. I just really like Bagarmossen.
One of these nice, atmosphere-creating things I like to stroll by is the tiny permaculture test garden outside the Bagarmossen Resilience Centre. The signs next to the plants inform about uses, making it a mini-format botanic garden. The center is an office collective and meeting place for entrepreneurs and activists interested in resilience and innovation. They test ideas for a more sustainable city. It is a hub for grassroots initiatives. As a resilience scholar, I love it. (Even though I myself haven’t contributed with anything. Yet.)
Bagarmossen, my home, a place full of kindred spirits.
Katja Malmborg 