Cities accumulate spaces that institutions no longer know what to do with. The former Caroli Church in Malmö – one of a growing number of desacralized churches in Sweden – presented exactly this kind of problem: a building of significant architectural and cultural weight, withdrawn from public use.

Caroli Park turned that waiting period into a three-week experiment in collective re-imagination. With 40 volunteers, local organizations, the Church of Sweden, and Malmö University, the space was returned to the neighborhood. Not with a program, but with an open-ended process. Tourists, parents, children, pensioners, and students arrived and did what people do when given space.

What Caroli Park demonstrated is that the barrier to participation is rarely the absence of community will, it is the presence of institutional closure. Our process gave the space new meanings and functions by inviting the public to re-imagine it through spontaneous use. Our confident in this process had its origin in the research and analyses we had done prior to implementing the project plan.