Gendered spaces. Multidimensional walks in urban history
Through a close collaboration between museums, archives and researchers, the project Gendered spaces contributes to a broad dissemination of knowledge about the intersectional layers of urban spaces. The aim is to develop a method that enables pluralistic descriptions of museum collections, which in turn will enhance the searchability of digitized material and form a basis for complex scholarly analyses. In order to develop this method, a close cooperation between scholars and archivists is required. This part of the project also forms the basis for several studies focusing on different urban spaces. The results of the project will be mediated through scientific publications, as well as lectures, exhibitions and guided city tours. The project collaborates with the Stockholm City Museum (SCM) in its development of a new, interactive digital guide to the city, where contextualised objects from the collections, as well as results of the different research projects, form an important part. The methodology and themes produced throughout the project will be developed within the SCM and in collaboration with Stockholmskällan. The project also has ties to Genusnod Stockholm, a cooperation among universities, museums and social movements, where cultural history and gender are used as points of departure for analyses of the contemporary city.
Final report
The project's purpose and development
The project has been about how we can find traces of hidden, forgotten or forbidden urban spaces in museums and archives. Our field and focus has been Stockholm from the early 19th century to the late 20th century. Researchers from history, cultural history and economic history, cultural geography and ethnology have worked together with antiquarians from four cultural heritage institutions. The rooms investigated are kitchen entrances, cafes, urinals, brothels and shop windows.
In the project, we have been inspired by the concept of polysemantics, which focuses on how materials are included in different contexts, carry multiple stories and encompass different dimensions of power. The cross-disciplinary grant has been rewarding in our endeavor to combine time, space and place with both materiality and lived experience.
The rooms we examined have different functions, charges and character. They bear physical and mental boundaries and a distinct gender character. Common themes are urban spatiality, gender perspective and a micro-historical approach with an emphasis on everyday life and lived experience. In the project, material from all participating institutions has been digitized, researched and made available.
Implementation
In consultation with participating cultural heritage institutions, material has been identified and selected for digitization in a first phase. Previously hard-to-access collections have been made available: paper art, photographs, memoirs, residential records, objects, sketchbooks and diary materials. An important principle has been that material selection is made in consultation based on more criteria than interest from the individual researcher. The material must have a potential research and general interest outside the project. The institutions must assess it as relevant. The condition of the material plays a role, as does the possibility of using it in other contexts.
Instead of creating a new database for the project, each institution's own channels have been used for making it available. In addition, Stockholmskällan has functioned as a window for digitized material.
By keeping a log book, the researchers have documented their research processes. The project has had many types of meetings. From reconciliations and conferences attended by the entire project group and reference group, to workshops and meetings between individual researchers and antiquarians or archivists who together looked for clues in the collections. Three conferences have been held with the entire project group. A wider circle was invited to the closing conference. Covid put a damper on several planned meetings within the project.
The main common denominator in the project's evaluation is the great gain from working together.
Results and conclusions
The project results can be said to have three levels that are closely related; the research results of the sub-studies, results for the method development part and insights into forms of collaboration.
By following individual Swiss migrants and their families, cultural historian Ulrika Torell shows how the introduction of a continental café culture in Stockholm created new spatialities. The Swiss founders were part of an international network of professional pastry chefs. By offering special product ranges and separate "ladies' rooms", they broke the male coding of coffee houses and "street salons".
Parallel to the Swiss redefining the city's public space, the brothel was also conceptualized. At the same time that the café room began to be described with new words as a specific urban sphere, the word brothel came into use and began to be understood as a room with special rules and props. Ethnologist Rebecka Lennartsson uses the erased Norra smedjegatan as an example to show how the formally banned brothel was accepted and influenced the urban experience.
Historian Karin Carlsson shows the gatekeeper's role as a human reinforcement of the boundary between the symbol-heavy home of the bourgeoisie and the street around the turn of the last century. The sorting of people was also manifested in the architecture. The kitchen stairs were built to hide individuals and goods. At the same time, they enabled other meetings and movements in the hidden.
Cultural geographer Thomas Wimark shows how the materiality of the park, in the form of urine cures, lighting, walkways, sofas and plantings, facilitated sexual encounters between men during the decades around the turn of the century in 1900, a period when these acts were criminalized.
The economic historian Klara Arnberg and the historian Orsi Husz investigate how the shop windows influenced the cityscape at the same time as they attracted consumption. The shop window can be seen as an actual and symbolic space that creates overlaps between the private and the public, the commercial, the artistic and the political. In an analysis of the Father's Day signs created in the 1930s and 40s, they show how masculinity was reformulated in the spirit of commercialism and in correspondence with the modern, enlightened and normative ideals of urban planning. The "Klara porra" of the 1960s and 70s was, for its part, characterized for a couple of decades by pornography in the neighborhood's small shop windows. A different masculinity was constructed here than in the Father's Day signs. With the feminist and anti-capitalist currents of the 1970s, shop windows also gained political explosiveness.
In the half-term reconciliation, a recommendation from the project was that research projects that use cultural heritage material should have funds set aside for collaboration with the institution concerned. However, real collaboration requires more. Below are some insights from the project.
By early presenting or jointly developing research ideas with the management team and affected employees, a basis is created for how material can be used and communicated. It is important that the project is a joint undertaking. Such anchoring facilitates projects and makes them less vulnerable to organizational changes. Personnel situations and financial conditions change, management re-prioritises. The anchoring work takes time – not just in an initial phase, but continuously. In Bekönade rum, many obstacles have been encountered in this part, despite an overall very positive reception.
The main common denominator in the evaluation is the gain from working together. In those meetings, it is also important to have an open mind, both towards employees and in relation to the material. The material should give rise to the research questions. It presupposes open problem formulations. The realization that one must let oneself be surprised by the material permeates the project and has influenced the outcome. However, meetings require a lot of time. More shorter joint reconciliations digitally would have been preferable. The collaboration could also have been taken a step further. This is what one of the researchers says:
Now we as researchers got to go "behind the scenes" at the memorial institutions and received very nice and exclusive help, but I think we also needed to challenge our roles a little more so that archivists and antiquarians also got to go "behind the scenes" with us researchers.
During a first phase of the project, the project group worked on developing a "navigator" that would function both as a way to orient oneself in collections and as a tool for collecting new information that could be fed back to the cultural heritage institution. The difficulty in obtaining a document meant that that part of the project fell apart into separate parts. The project has revealed concrete tips on how to find "spatial spaces" in archives. Clustering, conversion, location association are some methods that are presented in a not yet published article. A simple template for keeping a logbook of the research process itself has been developed. The method is inspired by ethnographic fieldwork and can contribute to further reflection on the role of the researcher, forms of collaboration. Finally, the project has involved a learning process in conveying results in an easily accessible and concise form. In workshops, researchers have tried writing texts for Stockholmskällan.
Instead of creating a new database for the project, each institution's own channels have been used to make it available. A proposal from the project is to publish signed researcher-generated metadata.
The project's contribution to the memory institutions
Through the project, much material has been digitized, made available and in parts researched. New knowledge has enriched the collections, although much work remains here.
Evaluation, mid-term, SSA: In terms of digitization tools, they work best when they are channeled into the already developed processes that exist at the various institutions. It is very inefficient to build new digital platforms for individual research projects. Therefore, it would be very valuable in the future if representatives of the major digitization projects in Sweden participated in collaborations of this kind.
Final evaluation, SSM: It was very rewarding to meet the researchers who participated in the project, to hear about their perspectives on materials in the museum collections. The conversations also led to new connections being made between different material categories at the museum. We also received information about materials that were in other of the participating institutions with links to ours.
A major benefit of research on cultural heritage institutions is the conditions it creates for mediation. Results from sub-studies have been the basis for city walks and countless lectures, articles, book presentations, podcasts, exhibitions and TV recordings with UR. The pig chamber in the museum apartment Stuckatören's floor at SSM has been furnished and an exhibition at SSM that will open in 2024 is partly based on the project. The anthology has inspired fiction writers and contributed material to novels.
Unforeseen technical and methodological problems
The project has been challenging in several ways. It is complicated to coordinate an extensive project with several institutions. The need for anchoring in management groups and among employees is great and presupposes an organization that sees the benefits of research, and employees who follow instructions. Externally funded projects must be incorporated into operations, time and resources must be set aside. The project must not be an addition to an already fully subscribed business plan. As the project ran over a long period of time, staff turnover and reorganizations had an impact. Substandard infrastructure in some parts, deprioritization and lack of clarity in governance are some of the explanations. The anchoring work has taken far more time than estimated, yet it has not been fully successful.
The researchers' general unfamiliarity with working with material culture is clear in the project, which can be read in the choice of material for digitization. The original idea of more clearly lifting objects from the collections has not been fully realized.
Certain digitized materials tend to remain within the organizations. This can be due to everything from ambiguities regarding copyright to a lack of resources and unclear procedures. The difficulty of cross-linking material between institutions when platforms are not compatible is worrisome from a research perspective. Sometimes there are no clear procedures for taking care of metadata. Development is underway here, with both collection management systems and new platforms for mediation. Gendered spaces have been partly involved in the development of such tools. From the archives, the point of view has been put forward that they prefer to digitize entire series rather than individual documents.
The project has lacked a common technical platform for sharing documents approved by the managing organization. Time space and ambition have not gone completely hand in hand in the project. All the steps are time-consuming, and space has sometimes been lacking to meet high goals.
Possibly new research questions
In each sub-study, new questions and fields have arisen. Gendered spaces have also inspired several other projects. The faces of the city (VR 2020) have touch points, for example. Arnberg has two new projects that treat Finland's ferries as acknowledged spaces (Handelsbanken's research foundations and the Baltic Sea Foundation). The EU-funded project City Memories: Visualizing change in three European capitals (Ann-Sofi Forsmark, SSA) was inspired by Bekönade rum. CfN has participated in several applications that originated in the project but were not granted funds. Orsi Husz is now part of CfN's research council. As spin-off effects during the course of the project, collaboration with the Hallwylska Museum and the Women's History Museum can be mentioned.
The project has also given rise to a follow-up question that was not discussed in the project group. The need for simple tools (a navigator) to both work in archives and collections, communicate about "finds" that may interest more people and enrich the collections with metadata has led to the idea of building an app that could collect and organize material on site in archives and collections, but also give the institution concerned tips and suggestions for metadata. A possible partner to build such an app could possibly be Open lab. https://openlabsthlm.se/sv/openlab-svenska/
The integration of the work at the memorial institution and how the work will be carried forward.
Below are some answers from part-time and final evaluation:
CfN: Our network has expanded and parts of the collections are now available in digital format. We have also gained greater insight into the collections we have, both through our own work with the material and through the researchers' analyzes and discussions based on the collections.
SSM: Familiar spaces involve a contextualization of the City Museum's collections, which is rarely possible in everyday work. The collections are researched, raise the museum's competence and create new stories about Stockholm. (…) The project has provided the opportunity to digitize sensitive material within the institution, which is important both from a preservation and accessibility perspective. Gendered spaces will probably have repercussions in the City Museum's operations.
SSA: This is one of the best-constructed research projects I've been involved in. The basic research question – how historical spaces have come to be known – has relevance in all times and places. This means that the project's "cases" - parks, brothels, shop windows, cafes and kitchens - all refer to the same fundamental problem. Despite the fact that the historical rooms in the project are different in character, strong synergy effects arise between the researchers' sub-investigations. (...) the arrangement is cost-effective (...) through the researchers' opportunity to work with staff from the cultural heritage institutions in the project. It is a meeting that creates added value both for the researchers and within the institutions.
How the project group has disseminated the research and results, and if and how the collaboration took place.
The researchers but also the staff of the cultural heritage institutions have presented the project at a very large number of conferences. At several institutions, staff presentations have been made. The project's results have also been presented in a number of texts, both scientific and popular science, in lectures, city walks, pods and talks. The closing conference Behind the Scenes of the City at the City Museum was recorded and the talks was posted on Stockholmia's website. An anthology in swedish was released druing the conference, that presents results from the sub-studies.All participating cultural heritage institutions have digitized as much material as the grant allowed and most of it is now available on the respective platform. Selections have been published on Stockholmskällan.
The project has been about how we can find traces of hidden, forgotten or forbidden urban spaces in museums and archives. Our field and focus has been Stockholm from the early 19th century to the late 20th century. Researchers from history, cultural history and economic history, cultural geography and ethnology have worked together with antiquarians from four cultural heritage institutions. The rooms investigated are kitchen entrances, cafes, urinals, brothels and shop windows.
In the project, we have been inspired by the concept of polysemantics, which focuses on how materials are included in different contexts, carry multiple stories and encompass different dimensions of power. The cross-disciplinary grant has been rewarding in our endeavor to combine time, space and place with both materiality and lived experience.
The rooms we examined have different functions, charges and character. They bear physical and mental boundaries and a distinct gender character. Common themes are urban spatiality, gender perspective and a micro-historical approach with an emphasis on everyday life and lived experience. In the project, material from all participating institutions has been digitized, researched and made available.
Implementation
In consultation with participating cultural heritage institutions, material has been identified and selected for digitization in a first phase. Previously hard-to-access collections have been made available: paper art, photographs, memoirs, residential records, objects, sketchbooks and diary materials. An important principle has been that material selection is made in consultation based on more criteria than interest from the individual researcher. The material must have a potential research and general interest outside the project. The institutions must assess it as relevant. The condition of the material plays a role, as does the possibility of using it in other contexts.
Instead of creating a new database for the project, each institution's own channels have been used for making it available. In addition, Stockholmskällan has functioned as a window for digitized material.
By keeping a log book, the researchers have documented their research processes. The project has had many types of meetings. From reconciliations and conferences attended by the entire project group and reference group, to workshops and meetings between individual researchers and antiquarians or archivists who together looked for clues in the collections. Three conferences have been held with the entire project group. A wider circle was invited to the closing conference. Covid put a damper on several planned meetings within the project.
The main common denominator in the project's evaluation is the great gain from working together.
Results and conclusions
The project results can be said to have three levels that are closely related; the research results of the sub-studies, results for the method development part and insights into forms of collaboration.
By following individual Swiss migrants and their families, cultural historian Ulrika Torell shows how the introduction of a continental café culture in Stockholm created new spatialities. The Swiss founders were part of an international network of professional pastry chefs. By offering special product ranges and separate "ladies' rooms", they broke the male coding of coffee houses and "street salons".
Parallel to the Swiss redefining the city's public space, the brothel was also conceptualized. At the same time that the café room began to be described with new words as a specific urban sphere, the word brothel came into use and began to be understood as a room with special rules and props. Ethnologist Rebecka Lennartsson uses the erased Norra smedjegatan as an example to show how the formally banned brothel was accepted and influenced the urban experience.
Historian Karin Carlsson shows the gatekeeper's role as a human reinforcement of the boundary between the symbol-heavy home of the bourgeoisie and the street around the turn of the last century. The sorting of people was also manifested in the architecture. The kitchen stairs were built to hide individuals and goods. At the same time, they enabled other meetings and movements in the hidden.
Cultural geographer Thomas Wimark shows how the materiality of the park, in the form of urine cures, lighting, walkways, sofas and plantings, facilitated sexual encounters between men during the decades around the turn of the century in 1900, a period when these acts were criminalized.
The economic historian Klara Arnberg and the historian Orsi Husz investigate how the shop windows influenced the cityscape at the same time as they attracted consumption. The shop window can be seen as an actual and symbolic space that creates overlaps between the private and the public, the commercial, the artistic and the political. In an analysis of the Father's Day signs created in the 1930s and 40s, they show how masculinity was reformulated in the spirit of commercialism and in correspondence with the modern, enlightened and normative ideals of urban planning. The "Klara porra" of the 1960s and 70s was, for its part, characterized for a couple of decades by pornography in the neighborhood's small shop windows. A different masculinity was constructed here than in the Father's Day signs. With the feminist and anti-capitalist currents of the 1970s, shop windows also gained political explosiveness.
In the half-term reconciliation, a recommendation from the project was that research projects that use cultural heritage material should have funds set aside for collaboration with the institution concerned. However, real collaboration requires more. Below are some insights from the project.
By early presenting or jointly developing research ideas with the management team and affected employees, a basis is created for how material can be used and communicated. It is important that the project is a joint undertaking. Such anchoring facilitates projects and makes them less vulnerable to organizational changes. Personnel situations and financial conditions change, management re-prioritises. The anchoring work takes time – not just in an initial phase, but continuously. In Bekönade rum, many obstacles have been encountered in this part, despite an overall very positive reception.
The main common denominator in the evaluation is the gain from working together. In those meetings, it is also important to have an open mind, both towards employees and in relation to the material. The material should give rise to the research questions. It presupposes open problem formulations. The realization that one must let oneself be surprised by the material permeates the project and has influenced the outcome. However, meetings require a lot of time. More shorter joint reconciliations digitally would have been preferable. The collaboration could also have been taken a step further. This is what one of the researchers says:
Now we as researchers got to go "behind the scenes" at the memorial institutions and received very nice and exclusive help, but I think we also needed to challenge our roles a little more so that archivists and antiquarians also got to go "behind the scenes" with us researchers.
During a first phase of the project, the project group worked on developing a "navigator" that would function both as a way to orient oneself in collections and as a tool for collecting new information that could be fed back to the cultural heritage institution. The difficulty in obtaining a document meant that that part of the project fell apart into separate parts. The project has revealed concrete tips on how to find "spatial spaces" in archives. Clustering, conversion, location association are some methods that are presented in a not yet published article. A simple template for keeping a logbook of the research process itself has been developed. The method is inspired by ethnographic fieldwork and can contribute to further reflection on the role of the researcher, forms of collaboration. Finally, the project has involved a learning process in conveying results in an easily accessible and concise form. In workshops, researchers have tried writing texts for Stockholmskällan.
Instead of creating a new database for the project, each institution's own channels have been used to make it available. A proposal from the project is to publish signed researcher-generated metadata.
The project's contribution to the memory institutions
Through the project, much material has been digitized, made available and in parts researched. New knowledge has enriched the collections, although much work remains here.
Evaluation, mid-term, SSA: In terms of digitization tools, they work best when they are channeled into the already developed processes that exist at the various institutions. It is very inefficient to build new digital platforms for individual research projects. Therefore, it would be very valuable in the future if representatives of the major digitization projects in Sweden participated in collaborations of this kind.
Final evaluation, SSM: It was very rewarding to meet the researchers who participated in the project, to hear about their perspectives on materials in the museum collections. The conversations also led to new connections being made between different material categories at the museum. We also received information about materials that were in other of the participating institutions with links to ours.
A major benefit of research on cultural heritage institutions is the conditions it creates for mediation. Results from sub-studies have been the basis for city walks and countless lectures, articles, book presentations, podcasts, exhibitions and TV recordings with UR. The pig chamber in the museum apartment Stuckatören's floor at SSM has been furnished and an exhibition at SSM that will open in 2024 is partly based on the project. The anthology has inspired fiction writers and contributed material to novels.
Unforeseen technical and methodological problems
The project has been challenging in several ways. It is complicated to coordinate an extensive project with several institutions. The need for anchoring in management groups and among employees is great and presupposes an organization that sees the benefits of research, and employees who follow instructions. Externally funded projects must be incorporated into operations, time and resources must be set aside. The project must not be an addition to an already fully subscribed business plan. As the project ran over a long period of time, staff turnover and reorganizations had an impact. Substandard infrastructure in some parts, deprioritization and lack of clarity in governance are some of the explanations. The anchoring work has taken far more time than estimated, yet it has not been fully successful.
The researchers' general unfamiliarity with working with material culture is clear in the project, which can be read in the choice of material for digitization. The original idea of more clearly lifting objects from the collections has not been fully realized.
Certain digitized materials tend to remain within the organizations. This can be due to everything from ambiguities regarding copyright to a lack of resources and unclear procedures. The difficulty of cross-linking material between institutions when platforms are not compatible is worrisome from a research perspective. Sometimes there are no clear procedures for taking care of metadata. Development is underway here, with both collection management systems and new platforms for mediation. Gendered spaces have been partly involved in the development of such tools. From the archives, the point of view has been put forward that they prefer to digitize entire series rather than individual documents.
The project has lacked a common technical platform for sharing documents approved by the managing organization. Time space and ambition have not gone completely hand in hand in the project. All the steps are time-consuming, and space has sometimes been lacking to meet high goals.
Possibly new research questions
In each sub-study, new questions and fields have arisen. Gendered spaces have also inspired several other projects. The faces of the city (VR 2020) have touch points, for example. Arnberg has two new projects that treat Finland's ferries as acknowledged spaces (Handelsbanken's research foundations and the Baltic Sea Foundation). The EU-funded project City Memories: Visualizing change in three European capitals (Ann-Sofi Forsmark, SSA) was inspired by Bekönade rum. CfN has participated in several applications that originated in the project but were not granted funds. Orsi Husz is now part of CfN's research council. As spin-off effects during the course of the project, collaboration with the Hallwylska Museum and the Women's History Museum can be mentioned.
The project has also given rise to a follow-up question that was not discussed in the project group. The need for simple tools (a navigator) to both work in archives and collections, communicate about "finds" that may interest more people and enrich the collections with metadata has led to the idea of building an app that could collect and organize material on site in archives and collections, but also give the institution concerned tips and suggestions for metadata. A possible partner to build such an app could possibly be Open lab. https://openlabsthlm.se/sv/openlab-svenska/
The integration of the work at the memorial institution and how the work will be carried forward.
Below are some answers from part-time and final evaluation:
CfN: Our network has expanded and parts of the collections are now available in digital format. We have also gained greater insight into the collections we have, both through our own work with the material and through the researchers' analyzes and discussions based on the collections.
SSM: Familiar spaces involve a contextualization of the City Museum's collections, which is rarely possible in everyday work. The collections are researched, raise the museum's competence and create new stories about Stockholm. (…) The project has provided the opportunity to digitize sensitive material within the institution, which is important both from a preservation and accessibility perspective. Gendered spaces will probably have repercussions in the City Museum's operations.
SSA: This is one of the best-constructed research projects I've been involved in. The basic research question – how historical spaces have come to be known – has relevance in all times and places. This means that the project's "cases" - parks, brothels, shop windows, cafes and kitchens - all refer to the same fundamental problem. Despite the fact that the historical rooms in the project are different in character, strong synergy effects arise between the researchers' sub-investigations. (...) the arrangement is cost-effective (...) through the researchers' opportunity to work with staff from the cultural heritage institutions in the project. It is a meeting that creates added value both for the researchers and within the institutions.
How the project group has disseminated the research and results, and if and how the collaboration took place.
The researchers but also the staff of the cultural heritage institutions have presented the project at a very large number of conferences. At several institutions, staff presentations have been made. The project's results have also been presented in a number of texts, both scientific and popular science, in lectures, city walks, pods and talks. The closing conference Behind the Scenes of the City at the City Museum was recorded and the talks was posted on Stockholmia's website. An anthology in swedish was released druing the conference, that presents results from the sub-studies.All participating cultural heritage institutions have digitized as much material as the grant allowed and most of it is now available on the respective platform. Selections have been published on Stockholmskällan.