Towards a Day in Lövholmen

Over the year I spent at OPI Lab 2025/2026, I have been researching the changing site of Lövholmen through different lenses: Site as Land – Site as Value – Site as People – Site as Knowledge. After more than a century of industrial production, paint, cement, carbon dioxide, and textiles, the site is undergoing a transformation that will reshape it entirely. The city plans 1,800 new apartments, a new waterfront, and a new neighborhood. The old buildings will mostly go. Some will stay. The question is what else stays, and what gets lost in the process.

For A Day in Lövholmen (June 6, 2026), I created a one-day meeting point and information hub in the middle of Lövholmen. The chosen site has been identified as a probable future location for commercial premises – a café, shop, or restaurant in the center of the new neighborhood of Lövholmen. By gathering there now, I invite a rehearsal of what will one day take place here. Can this layer leave a trace, or change what is negotiated here?

“What are we doing here?” visitors may well ask as they sit down. 

Visitors can have a coffee, ask questions, speculate about the future, and even negotiate around the table. The table isn’t a finished prototype; the work happens around the table. The meeting point is a temporary manifestation of what will exist at this spot in ten years time; the table a spatial form for a longer-term proposal to open up Lövholmen, through making connections with those already active in the area.

Towards A Day in Lövholmen proposes a discussion of the proposition to open Lövholmen in the present, between actors and the visiting public. On Thursday, 4th June, I hosted a semi-public dinner discussion at OPI Lab with local stakeholders and key actors in Lövholmen.

The outcomes from these conversations were presented at the table as a short essay.