Who cares for urban repair? Stretching the life of buildings, the case of the Edman Pavillion in Lund’s (Sweden) People’s Park.

In architecture and urban geography, discussions on repair, maintenance and adap5ve re-usehave emerged as a crucial intellectual terrain. Temporal aspects of how the urban fabric isused have also emerged as an issue worth theore5cal and empirical a=en5on. Latching ontothese themes, we will present work tracking the history of conten5on around the publiclyowned mee5ng and arts venue in Lund’s Peoples’ Park – the Edman Pavilion – stretching backdecades and through several phases of poten5al demoli5on (and protec5on). We will tracethe genealogies of mul5ple and compe5ng forms of caring and repara5ve architecturalprac5ces, which craGs this building as worthy of being maintained and adapted for newfunc5ons. In this, we will point to compe5ng claims about what kind of support that thebuilding offers for different uses and purposes, and who are the appropriate users. Actorsinvolved in architectural repair of this contested building a=ach themselves to the fate of theobject, but they also a=ach cons5tuencies to the building as its actual and poten5al users. Thispaper will explore the stretching out of a building’s life as a complex and mul5-layeredhistorical geography of care and repair, but also that stretching across 5me entails a stretchingin space. The paper explores the capacity of the building, an example of Swedish brutalismexplicitly aiming to be versa5le and flexible, to be stretched and bent for different purposes –and thus its capacity to sustain over 5me.