About me

Tomas Wikström (photo 2007 Cathy Tuttle)

My field of interest covers urban public space, urban design and architecture, everyday life, new media in urban settings, and human-environment interaction — cities, architecture and the everyday

ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH,  TEACHING  &   LECTURES

Grantorp residaential area in Flemingsberg 2004

RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

My research and development activities offered typically involve studies of urban and suburban areas regarding their topology, production, design and use — from the perspectives of different categories of users/producers.

Ongoing research:

Mobilities and Meeting-Places in the New Urban Landscape (MobiScape)

(Apart from this abstract, the text is in Swedish only.)

The project addresses questions regarding the spread-out daily life that is characteristic for large portions of today's population. More and more, we tend to lead lifes that involve movement between a number of distributed and not continuously linked places. Each one of us then disposes his or her place-world, sharing each place with lots of people but all places with (almost) none. This is the contrary to traditional local communities, where most places are known and visited by a majority of its members on a regular basis.

Hofors, town centre — a local community? (2006)

What places then are important in people's spread-out place-worlds? In what ways and by what means are those places — peculiar for each person — communicated to and shared by others? How are group experiences introduced in such individual contexts (family shopping, recreation, tourism)? What do interactive media contribute with (mobile phones, social media etc)?

Research projects (2005-2010) were funded by FORMAS and VR

Kupolen - shopping centre in Borlänge (2008)

The Responsive City. Everyday tactics as creative resistance.

(So fr, only the first few section are translated into English)

In times of a renaissance for urban life and public space it becomes necessary to examine new modes of action and to review existing ideas and ways of understanding regarding the city.

The project focuses a certain discrepancy that has become more and more obvious, between on one hand people’s expectations of rich and active relations to urban environments and, on the other, the conspicuous lack of response, especially from the products of contemporary urban design and architecture. One basic question is under what conditions and in what ways architecture and urban space can be involved in relations of responsivity. Another is what properties of the built environment that hinder such interaction.

Installation, rue Marx Dormoy, Paris 2005

The research is delimited to public space — however in the wide sense suggested by the definition of public domain as “those places where an exchange between different social groups is possible and also actually occurs.”  The focus of the project is primarily outside the traditional dense city. From the perspective of urban responsivity, the greatest challenges and the strongest potential of change are to be found in the “actually existing city”, that is: in the dispersed and splintered urban landscape of the so-called periphery.

Partly funded by Lund University

Chatillon, Rue de Paris,  2009-10-10, kl 22:47

TEACHING

My teaching includes:

• university and public lectures
• university courses
• the role as tutor/examiner and critic of diploma works
• the tutoring of PhD-students

Parkgatan Forever. Diploma work 2009 by Sara Andersson.

LECTURES

I offer lectures in public settings and at universities. Here are some recent examples:

• Local and Global Communities. (Malmö University College, November 2009)
• Writing on the Skin of the City. About the cultural heritage of last night. (Historical museum, Stockholm, October 2009)
• The Responsive City (Urbanity and Innovation, Borås museum, October 2009)
• Place and Identity in the Urban Landscapes of Modernity (Dept of Landscape Architecture, SLU, October 2009)
• What Makes a District a City? Walking the urban landscapes of modernism. (Haninge kommun, April 2009)

What Makes a District a City? Haninge station 2009.

• Public domain in the modernist urban landscape — Flemingsberg in the Stockholm region. (OPUS Conference Stavanger, June 2008)
• The Home and Communication Media. (Dept of Informatics, LU, April 2008)
• Cellphones and Cities. Real and virtual mobilities in the urban landscape. (ARCHitectural INQuiries, CTH, Gothenburg, April 2008)
• Places, Barriers and Tactics of Movement (Dept of Landscape Architecture, SLU, February 2008)
• Urban Mobilities. (City of Malmö, October 2007)
• Places, Barriers and Tactics of Movement in Flemingsberg. (Dept of Sociology, Umeå Univ, October 2006)
• Residual Space and Transgressive Spatial Practises. (FORMAS, August 2006)
• Connecting the Suburban Landscape — the significance of informal footpaths in Flemingsberg, Sweden. (Walk 21 Conference, Copenhagen, June 2004)

Paris 2009: Bum-proof design