THE OUTLANDS: A look into the Post-Industrial Swedish Archipielago

The Outlands. Swedish archipelago in the after-effects of industrial modernity. Image by Alejandro Haiek Coll

Context

The Swedish post-industrial archipelago is marked by a condition of structural fragility. The archipelago is not only a landscape of islands but a jurisdictional mosaic shaped by environmental law, industrial legacy, and cultural claims. Protected reserves overlap with military zones, abandoned infrastructures, and touristic enclaves, producing contradictory regimes of use and care, and uneven geographies of neglect and exclusion. Questions of ownership and responsibility remain unresolved, as municipal, state, and private interests intersect with boundaries of protection as well as with community initiatives. These territories embody the agents of disturbance shaping the Nordic region: disrupted water systems, eroded forests, invasive infrastructures of energy and transport, and the displacement of migratory species. They are also sites where sovereignty is fractured, where municipal authorities, private corporations, and state regulations overlap without reconciliation. At a broader scale, international agreements on climate adaptation, biodiversity, and the recognition of nature’s rights place the archipelago within planetary debates on loss and damage. The fragile balance between protection and exploitation is not only ecological but geopolitical, situating the Swedish Outlands as testing grounds for how territories in post-industrial condition can be governed, restored, and re-imagined. These conditions demand more than mitigation; they call for practices of truth, accountability, and systemic repair that can transform these wounded landscapes into grounds of ecological and social renewal.

Studio Agenda

Studio 12 will interrogate the post-industrial Swedish archipelago as a testing ground for ecological and cultural futures. The studio agenda aims for long-term social and ecological change. We will focus on lasting transformation through specific sites, working closely with communities and institutional partners. Stewardship will be re-framed as an active practice of care and re-balancing, advancing from immediate interventions toward systemic repair and the projection of long-term renewal. Two islands anchor the investigations: Norrbyskär, once a flourishing industrial settlement established in 1895 and now undergoing one of Sweden’s largest coastal remediation projects of its kind; and Holmön, a living island community with roots dating back roughly 700 years, where fragile ecosystems intersect with conservation frameworks and resilient cultural practices. At Norrbyskär, we will study remediation, demonstrating how soil and water recovery becomes technical, legal, and political, requiring evidence, accountability, and negotiation. At Holmön, we will highlight how fragile ecosystems and resilient cultural practices persist under conservation frameworks lacking regional planning and territorial perspective, while facing the pressures of climate and infrastructural change. These islands reveal two different post-conditions. Some, like Norrbyskär, embody the legacies of extraction: toxic sediments, fractured soils, polluted waters, abandoned infrastructures, and the exhaustion of local ecologies. Others, like Holmön, expose a different complexity, where enduring local traditions and adaptive community practices coexist with ecological systems yet remain vulnerable to climate change, infrastructural dependency, and demographic challenges. Together they will allow us to explore two contrasting conditions, one shaped by industrial clean-up and institutional interventions, the other by ongoing stewardship and community re-engineering. Their juxtaposition enables comparative analysis and synthesis, opening multiple perspectives on how ecological repair, governance, and autonomy can be enacted in the archipelago.

Studio Methodology

Studio 12 is an experimental laboratory where design operates simultaneously as research method, investigative practice, and imaginative speculation. The pedagogy combines research-by-design with fieldwork, critical cartographies, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Methods are grounded in evidentiary practices, spatial analysis and ecological sampling, while simultaneously projecting speculative futures through design prototyping and scenario-building. The studio’s workflow unfolds in two phases: a forensic semester, focused on unveiling loss, damage, and disturbance across chosen sites; and a regenerative semester, where projects evolve into scenarios of repair, re-wilding, and autonomy. This process is iterative and multi-scalar, moving between site-based investigations, systemic modeling, and trans-scalar projections. Methodological rigour is paired with speculative experimentation, ensuring that each project is both grounded in evidence and open to the imagination of alternative futures. Students will revisit special states of protection, preservation, and conservation law, as well as environmental regulation and territorial status, while situating these investigations within the geopolitical implications of regional planning, territorial and interspecies design, and material imaginaries. Projects will address these challenges in two directions: first, by exposing agents of disturbance and unveiling the infrastructural, ecological, and political violence embedded in the territory; and second, by hypothesizing regenerative futures, re-imagining these wounded geographies as socio-ecological laboratories. Project strategies will include bio-remediation and rewilding to re-balance disrupted metabolisms; community-driven autonomy to reorganize energy, food, and water sovereignty; and interspecies design to embed ecological agency into frameworks of stewardship and justice. Finally, the studio proposes that multi-species cohabitation must guide any future territorial design. By embedding the rights and agency of non-human beings into decisionmaking, post-industrial islands can become biotopes where ecological justice is enacted.

Teaching team: Alejandro Haiek Coll (Studio Responsible); Tutors: Emelie Aktanius, Rebecca Rudolph and Julia Samberg; External tutors: Ebba Landstedt, Felix Gutafsson