NEW PROJECTS
(2024-)

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CSAM MAINTENANCE AWARDS 2025

AN AWARD HONOURING THE CARETAKERS
AND HIDDEN GEMS OF THE CITY, MALMÖ, 2025

Kyrkogrottan in Limhamn —
Winner of the CSAM Maintenance Award 2025

Kyrkogrottan is one of the city’s most unexpected and cherished places, used for generations for play, gatherings, reflection, and everyday life. In a city shaped by increasingly commercial and over-designed spaces, it stands out by remaining open, unmarked, and free to be shaped by people’s imagination. For its endurance, its ability to bring people together over time, and for showing that the city’s true magic lies in the unexpected, Kyrkogrottan is awarded the CSAM Maintenance Award 2025.

Nominees 2025:

Lifra and CEO Anders Fransson
Lifra, under CEO Anders Fransson, shows that true stewardship is about long-term responsibility for both places and people by caring for what already exists, taking responsibility in times of crisis, and building sustainable relationships instead of chasing short-term profits - therefore we nominate Lifra and Anders Fransson for the CSAM Maintenance Awards.

Återbyggdepån, Inre Hamnen
Återbyggdepån in Malmö shows how everyday reuse can build a city’s sustainability by allowing functioning materials and practices to keep functioning without drawing attention to themselves — therefore we nominate Återbyggdepån for the CSAM Maintenance Awards for its robust, low-key, and indispensable work.

Almvik 4H Farm, Almvik
Almvik 4H Farm is a long-term stewarded place where animals, cultivation, and volunteer engagement give children and young people a living relationship to nature and the city - therefore we nominate the farm for the CSAM Maintenance Awards for keeping an invaluable environment alive with small means and great care.

Kyrkogrottan, Limhamn
Kyrkogrottan in Limhamn is a simple and self-sustaining place where history, play, and community have been allowed to live on without being over-designed - therefore we nominate it for the CSAM Maintenance Awards for showing that the city’s most valuable spaces are often those that are allowed to remain free and used on their own terms.

Alta Art Space, Sorgenfri
Alta Art Space shows how worn but functioning spaces can become long-term engines for art and community when they are stewarded with care and flexibility - therefore we nominate Alta Art Space for the CSAM Maintenance Awards for letting creativity grow within what already exists.

Öresundsparken, Ribersborg
Öresundsparken is Malmö’s quiet green backdrop which, through its robust and timeless design, continues to carry the city’s everyday life without demanding attention - therefore we nominate the park for the CSAM Maintenance Awards for its low-key but indispensable presence.

CSAM Maintenance Awards is a newly established award that, with seriousness and humor, aims to celebrate the city’s everyday places. Those that work, endure, and are cared for with attention. Places where maintenance happens without major investments or spectacular interventions, but which nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because of this, play an important role in urban life.

At a time when architecture and urban development awards often go to new, shiny projects, we at CSAM want to highlight what already exists and risks disappearing in the shadow of the new.

The prize is part of CSAM’s artistic practice and seeks to contribute to a broader discussion about what we value in our urban environment. By rewarding what has survived everyday wear and tear and been managed with limited means, we want to emphasize the sustainable, the subtle, and the often overlooked.

The CSAM Maintenance Awards is a recognition of the city’s caretakers and the places that, thanks to their efforts, continue to be part of our shared story.

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Nomination Criteria aiming to highlight and reward places that form the city’s true backbone and contribute to a sustainable and vibrant urban environment:

Long-term functionality
The place should have been in use for a long period of time and continue to function well for its users, without extensive renovations or investments.

Everyday significance
The place should be part of everyday life and matter to many people, even if it is not spectacular or widely known.

Careful stewardship
The place should have been cared for in a way that shows consideration, creativity, or perseverance — often with small means and simple solutions.

Sustainability over time
The place should demonstrate social and ecological sustainability by having adapted to and survived changes in society.

Unnoticed quality
The place should exemplify something that is often overlooked or not recognized in traditional prizes and awards.

THE ESCH CLINICS

During the 2025-2027 cycle CSAM are a part of The Esch Clinics. An urban research project promoted by the Chair of The City of Esch at the University of Luxembourg. The project will accompany The City of Esch in its regeneration process from an economy founded on the extractive steel industry in Central Europe to one based on knowledge and services.

The Esch Clinics focuses on the reproductive activities of the city and the support structures that, despite often being hidden, make a city function.

Within The Esch Clinics, we take part in investigating different forms of urban commoning and political collaboration in a context of just socio-economic transition towards carbon neutrality. The aim is to read and understand the urban commons in Esch and promote spatial politics of the commons.

ONGOING RESEARCH RESIDENCY w/ CULTURES OF ASSEMBLY
ESCH-ZUR-ALZETTE, LUXEMBURG, 2025-2027

OLDER PROJECTS
(2019-2024)

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NOISY NEIGHBOURS

How might formal models of city planning become more attuned to the value of what is already there? Can noise be used as a planning tool to safeguard places of production, culture and commons in the future city? Can new interpretations of existing legislation help us prevent neighbourhoods from becoming assets in the financial market and instead develop important spaces and networks?

NOISY NEIGHBOURS is a review of a five-year process that has gone beyond established urban development models on a neighbourhood level. It presents new narratives that outline what Sofielund is and can be through neighbourhood mapping, formal planning processes, and artistic practices.

The starting point is Sofielund – an overlooked run-down industrial area that turned into a cultural, social and manufacturing hotspot in Malmö, Sweden. Here, an atlas mapping existing conditions and a new formal plan for Sofielund points out a new direction in taking responsibility for the neighbourhood and city as a whole. The strategic document calls for a slower pace of development in tune with the urban and cultural ecosystems that are already there.

NOISY NEIGHBOURS calls for the preservation of noisy places of production and important meeting spaces for communities. It also introduces a new strategic tool: the “cultural-industrial sound zone” or “kulturljudzon”.

The story of collaborations and exchanges between CSAM, local artists, White Arkitekter and the City of Malmö represented in NOISY NEIGHBOURS gives clues to more open and explorative planning practices that can challenge the politics of land use and real estate speculation.

Oslo Architecture Triennale
Koozarch
White Arkitekter
Wallpaper
Form/Design Center

OSLO ARCHITECTURE TRIENNALE, SEP-NOV 2022 (GROUP EXHIBITION)
FORM/DESIGN CENTER, MALMÖ, SEP 2023-JAN 2024 (SOLO)

"BETWEEN THE VISION OF URBAN PLANNING AND THE DISTORTIONS OF REALITY"

A CONVERSATION ON ART AND CITY PLANNING AT SIGNAL CENTER FÖR SAMTIDSKONST, MALMÖ, 28 NOV 2022

The year is 2022. The gaming giant Massive has purchased an entire block and moved into Möllevången. The former textile Factory has become "Trikåfabriken", with new tenants and a new direction. The rehearsal spaces at Sorgenfri have been replaced by the newly built residential building “Iggy.” It’s no surprise that a city grows and changes. But what happens when everything becomes homogenized? How can we ensure that public art spaces and creative production sites are not pushed out by office complexes?

Malmö’s art scene is thriving, yet several studio associations, exhibition spaces, and collective workshops are under immediate threat of losing their premises. Economics, profit maximization, and the vision of a dynamic mixed city are proving incompatible. We need to challenge entrenched structures and traditional displacement mechanisms. It’s often said that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. So, how do we protect a mixed and sustainable city where everyone has a place, including the less financially powerful, such as artists and cultural actors?

Ateljéupproret in Sydsvenskan

BLANDSTADENS TAKTIK

Blandstadens taktik (Mixed City Tactics) was a group exhibition from seven local artists, with new works based on the ongoing development of Sofielund’s industrial area.

The works presented were produced in an exploratory process where CSAM and the artists have gathered several times over the past year to discuss the concept of the mixed city and the role and space of culture in the development of the city.

During the process, many questions have been asked and explored: Can including artistic readings of the city create new perspectives on planning? Can they form new ways of talking about, experiencing and describing a place that is in a formative stage of the development process? Who is allowed to interpret what the city is and can be? Who gets to highlight or withhold information when the story of the future city is written? How does the language and drawings of urban planning documents work to exclude those not in the know?

The passage of time is both a challenge and an asset as the city changes. What can we discover, capture and learn if we give ourselves more time to understand a place and its life? Who is it that needs to stop and immerse themselves? How can an in-depth study be given the opportunity to form the development? Above all: how can we take time to understand what is there and what could come in the future?

A “cultural sound zone” has been established at Sofielund. That it is specifically the sound of culture highlighted in the current planning is symptomatic of our time. The new sound zone means that manufacturing, repairs, bread baking and more can carry on and be developed, yet culture takes center stage.

Sometimes it can feel unclear who the players are behind the process. Who are the authors and recipients of planning and development? Who are the planners? Who is it planned for? What role does art play in the development of the city? How should we as “value creators” relate to the elevated role of art and culture? How do our actions affect others’ opportunities to participate and be seen?

These discussions have resulted in seven original works inspired by the questions of language, time, power and authorship. Seven new layers of interpretation of Sofielund. Together, they offer the spectator a deep dive into the city's sounds, materials and tactile expressions. They recount the architectural history of the neighborhood and articulate invisible urban boundaries.

The exhibition does not capture all of what Sofielund is and can become. It represents seven individual views and could be augmented ad infinitum. The more people involved in how and on what terms our city changes, the better.

CSAM works at the intersection of art, policy development and architecture. Our aim is to explore contemporary urban development mechanisms and the stories that support them by working with local artists and civil society in processes rooted in Malmö.

Sydsvenskan

GROUP EXHIBITION, NORRA GRÄNGESBERGSGATAN 26, MALMÖ
SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2022

ATLAS OF LOST DOORS/LEVANDE BOTTENVÅNING

Levande Bottenvåning is a photographic archive of a changing urban landscape. Doors that have disappeared, openings that have closed for good, shops turned into private residences and entrances replaced by concrete walls.

Urban environments document their previous uses, former conditions and the decisions that have shaped a city’s future. What stories do they tell? A story about a city that existed before we arrived? A story of another life that could have been lived here, a thriving urban environment that once existed but now is gone.

The city has always been an arena for the exchange of goods, knowledge and ideas. In the past, this exchange often took place directly on the city’s streets and squares. With the introduction of the automobile, the street’s spaces became dominated by traffic. Social and commercial areas moved indoors, often directly adjacent to the street, in the ground floor.

Today, the existence of public ground floors is no longer a given — shopping and social needs have moved online and the walls surrounding urban living environments grow higher and higher. In suburban centers many types of previously public ground floors are being converted into housing, and in the inner city, tenant-owner associations prefer to avoid cumbersome tenants.

When new neighbourhoods are being planned, the importance of creating “active ground floors” is always stressed. Dense environments with varied public offerings and shops on every street corner — echoing the way many parts of our central cities used to look. Once the coveted public ground floor premises are created, the rent is often so high that they end up empty or homes to chain stores and real estate brokers.

To further complicate the situation, we now see an accelerated development where empty storefronts line our city streets as a result of the pandemic as locals flee urban environments for the safe vastness of suburbia. This creates an ever more anonymous and fragmented urban landscape — a situation that urban archaeologists of the future will hold our contemporaries accountable for.

Sydsvenskan

ONLINE ARCHIVE AND EXHIBITION, GALLERI AGU, KIVIKSGATAN, MALMÖ, APRIL-MAY 2021

SÄMJAN INVEST

In 1929, Virginia Woolf’s book “A Room of One’s Own” was published for the first time. In the book, which is based on two lectures held at Cambridge University, Woolf addresses the preconditions for women to develop literary writing. The essay is a central piece of feminist writing, noted in its argument for both a literal and figurative space for women’s writers within a literary tradition dominated by men. In the essay Woolf addresses issues still relevant today, amongst others, the conditions necessary for the creation of works of art.

Over time, the question of the conditions of culture – both economic and spatial – has been widely engaged and addressed by cultural policy, practitioners and other actors. The economic aspects have been at the center of this discussion while the spatial conditions necessary for the creation of art have ironically, by being physical, become less tangible to address. The rooms exist, but in the background of the discourse. In a world that is more urbanized than ever, where cities have become placeholders for capital instead of living habitats for citizens, the spaces of production of culture are slowly becoming extinct.

This project starts here, in the urbanized world, with the question asked by Woolf one hundred years ago: What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?

In June 2019, the company Nyfosa enters the Malmö market buying 40 000 sqm of property to a value of SEK 700 million. The company describes themselves as “A transaction intensive opportunistic developer” with the “Objective to develop and refine a growing property portfolio with long-term and high returns”.

One of the buildings they acquire, an old factory located in what 100 years ago used to be the periphery of Malmö, now a hip urban neighborhood, is inhabited by some of the leading independent cultural actors of the region; Malmö Dockteater, Potato Potato Scenkonst and Karavan. Three internationally acknowledged performing art groups, that to their respective stage attract visitors from the city, the region and abroad to more than 150 events, plays and performances per year.

This is a participatory action research project where the process of Sämjan is followed from a now to that when all windows for negotiation are closed. The aim is to map and visualize the trajectory of the transformation process while it’s happening. The development process is actively addressed in a series of interventions in order to challenge the narrative of different possible futures for Sämjan and its artistic community.

The answer is not a given, nor are the results of this project. This will either result in yet another obituary of a place that once produced culture – or – it becomes a documentation of how you practically obstruct your own extinction.

Sydsvenskan

Arkitektur

PROCESS MANAGEMENT AND VISION DEVELOPMENT FOR SCENKONSTKVARTERET SÄMJAN, MALMÖ, 2019-2020