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The Swedish Social Services Act (SFS 2001:453) stipulates since 1982 that the municipal Social Committee should become well acquainted with the living conditions in the municipality. They should also participate in urban planning, and in cooperation with other public bodies, organizations, associations and individuals promote good living environments in the municipality. The development, planning and design of good living environments for older people is an endeavour of great complexity that demands collaboration between many actors. Housing and care for older people is an important area in which social servicesand urban planning could benefit from collaboration. Planning for older people has recently been indicated as urgent and necessary, especially in the light of changed demography in which the proportion of older people is increasing. A built environment that accommodates older people’s everyday needs embraces issues such as age-friendliness, care, socio-spatial inequality, inclusion, and innovation. This research program, CollAge, investigates cross-sectoral collaboration in Swedish municipalities between social eldercare, urban planning and Senior Citizens’ Councils as regards housing and care. With diverse qualitative methodologies the multidisciplinary team of scholars in social work, architecture and urban planning  explore how eldercare interventions and services are managed and understood in municipal urban planning and development, and how older people’s preferences can contribute to improved quality of care in social services and housing provision.  The ultimate aim of the programme is to develop a methodological tool – CollAge – to support, facilitate and structure collaboration between the three actors.

This essay looks to decolonise the technological history of the greenhouse through arts research. My decolonial research approach is rooted in the forms and forces, the geoaesthetics that shape my life and upbringing on the colony that still is my home-island of Puerto Rico, as part of the broader Caribbean milieu and diaspora. Over time, from that life and research, an intuition emerged, one that led me to sense how the greenhouse strongly represents man’s misleading delusion of mastery over, and disconnection from nature. It is from that intuition and ensuing research that I set-forth the following hypothesis: if the greenhouse metaphor embodies the dissociative, colonial reflex driving global warming, then the invention of the greenhouse must be one of the beginnings to the geological timeline of the Anthropocene. 

This research uses film, photography and projection to analyse the changing space of Northern Sweden (Norrland). This peripheral region is one of the most rapidly reconfiguring spaces in Europe, with on-going programmes of corporate and state investment to exploit space and natural resources for settlement and extraction. 

The images are part of an archive of the moving of buildings, a common practice in the region. Buildings are moved in relation to changing environmental conditions and now urban land values and global property speculation. It is understood to be a distinct process of what David Harvey has described as "remaking capitalism’s geography"[1] 

Images analyse the material conditions, ideology and power in this frontier economy. The project considers an architecture of de-growth[2], challenging ideas of the expanding urbanisation of Norrland. As land values and modes of occupation change, buildings are displaced from the urban centre to increase occupation density through speculative investment. This process displaces social space and previous land formations. The city of Kirunahas been entirely displaced by expanding mine workings. The practice of relocation also has the capacity to shift large-scale historic architectures, as a distinct form of caretaking. 

In this moment of new waves of investment in mining and forestry, of urbanisation of parts of the region, predicated on an underlying and largely uncontested agenda of 'development', the archive makes other conceptions of space and architectural production. 

The images consider the wrenching of a house from its location and moving it to another location, documenting this process of detachment. It records the re-arrangements of spacebetween land and building. Displacement is illuminated through projections to unsettle, by superimposing architectures onto previous conditions.

 [1] David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism. (London: Profile Books, 2011), 180.[2] André Gorz, Ecology As Politics. (UK: Pluto Press, 1987)

Nuclear legacies can last for millions of years, and artists will continue to investigate them within the contemporary conditions of our time. In the twenty first century Kota Takeuchi is interested in how we physically view and perform images of nuclear events and their memory. His practice investigates relationships between media and social memory by revisiting historical monuments and creating media archaeologies of nuclear industrial legacies. He also has a powerful ability to collapse the visual and emotional distance between the viewer and the subject, perhaps because he has chosen to live in the context of his work, to be located and engaged in the complex social, economic and aesthetic processes of the post-Fukushima event. Takeuchi’s embedded artworks draw us closer to the contaminated site of the dilapidated Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power plant, and trace connections with nuclear sites across the planet. 

This paper aims to identify a number of challenges arising from the separation of artistic and scientific research, and how they are being addressed through the establishment of the new UmArts research centre. Through a discussion of research principles and questions, the paper will start to articulate the value of interdisciplinary research practices where artists and curators have the freedom to develop all kinds of knowledge and disseminate it in many different forms. This debate has many synergies with decolonial discourse in challenging the empirical traditions of science, opening up space for new kinds of knowledge and new (or very old) ways of knowing. 

UmArts takes an interdisciplinary approach both between the arts subjects, and between arts and humanities/sciences which embraces all the different artistic and scientific research criteria with the arts subjects. Whilst the definitions of art and science may seem somewhat arbitrary semantics for most hybrid researchers, their differences are constantly instituted within university and state research funding bureaucracies. With each bureaucratic inscription the characteristics of artistic research are in danger of being narrowed by trying to defend itself against the academization of its subject. 

Whilst many artists will be glad to know that their subject is receiving due care and attention, the separation of art and science produces many semantic, intellectual and discursive problems. There is a danger that separating out art as an exception, can create a research hierarchy with art as a second tier within the academy, reducing its intellectual capacity and agency. A more relaxed and flexible approach is needed to develop a rigorous culture of arts research which can operate in hundreds of different ways. There are as many artistic research methods as there are artists, and not every artwork is a doctorate in itself, so a clear set of research principles are needed as a basic rubric for evaluation. Fortunately these already exist within the wider discourses and practices of research. 

The Nuclear Culture project of Ele Carpenter is the overarching title for her curatorial research into art and nuclear culture covering the full material trace of radioactive materials from uranium mining, energy and weapons production, decommissioning and waste. The curatorial process involves working closely with artists and a range of nuclear contexts, carrying out field research, commissioning new artworks, curating exhibitions and hosting roundtable discussions and symposia. The project started in 2011 when Carpenter was invited to talk about how artists might respond to submarine dismantling by the Submarine Dismantling Project Advisory Group (SDPAG) who were advising the British Ministry of Defence on how to take apart and store their old laid up nuclear submarines, some of which still have their old reactors on board. This article is a conversation between Maarten Vanden Eynde and Ele Carpenter about the urgency of nuclear visibility and deep time responsibility of radioactive waste in a period of increasing insurmountability.

Digitally textured everyday is controlled by Terms of Service agreements. These documents are used to legitimize extractivist data practices of technology companies. To do so, they tap into the power of words. By gathering words in a specific flow and structure for a specific purpose, these create a specific type of narrative. They define who is who, who can do what, who can’t do what and set the rules of the game serving to the benefit of the technology companies. Through these tactics, they make a specific type of world for us to live in and control our sense of being online and offline. 

Counter-acting lexicons for the Terms of Service is an exploration into the power of words in shaping our worlds. At the garden of BioArt Labs, lexicons that attempt to change the conversation for imagining eco-social contracts as alternatives for the Terms of Service will be exhibited. Using the letters of ‘eco-social contracts’ as a starting point, the installation presents counter-acting vocabularies that think with humans and nonhumans rather than only with corporations. How about ‘E’ for ‘entanglement’, ‘C’ for ‘care’, ‘N’ for 'negotiation'? This exhibition is a conversation starter to change the conversation for imagining eco-social contracts.

Digitally textured everyday is controlled by Terms of Service agreements. These documents are used to legitimize extractivist data practices of technology companies. To do so, they tap into the power of words. By gathering words in a specific flow and structure for a specific purpose, these create a specific type of narrative. They define who is who, who can do what, who can’t do what and set the rules of the game serving to the benefit of the technology companies. Through these tactics, they make a specific type of world for us to live in and control our sense of being online and offline. 

Counter-acting lexicons for the Terms of Service is an exploration into the power of words in shaping our worlds. At the garden of BioArt Labs, lexicons that attempt to change the conversation for imagining eco-social contracts as alternatives for the Terms of Service will be exhibited. Using the letters of ‘eco-social contracts’ as a starting point, the installation presents counter-acting vocabularies that think with humans and nonhumans rather than only with corporations. How about ‘E’ for ‘entanglement’, ‘C’ for ‘care’, ‘N’ for 'negotiation'? This exhibition is a conversation starter to change the conversation for imagining eco-social contracts.