Where Can I Find Justice? The Changing Relationship Between the Courthouse and the City

After a long period of being constructed as anonymous administration complexes, first instance courts are once again being built as emblematic elements of the city, designed by renowned architects and rising on central plots adjacent to train stations, headquarters buildings and exclusive residential areas. This is happening at a time of centralisation, upsizing and property privatisation, and where European courthouses have radically decreased in number. The paper focuses on the changing relationship between the courthouse and the city as it has developed in the last decades, using Sweden as a case. Examining and comparing the fourteen new Swedish district courthouses built between 2000 and 2024, and the changes in their locations, we show how the territorial threshold between the court and the public space of the city is expressed and negotiated on different scales. Discussing aspects such as regional and local accessibility and visibility, as well as permeability and connectivity, we argue that the courthouse is gradually taking on a new role, where accessibility is increasingly monitored and specialised, and where the lawcourt as an object also has developed into a segregated territorial landscape, albeit often situated in a privileged location in the city.