Introduction: Materiality and Nordic Welfare

This special issue explores and seeks to reinterpret Nordic welfare history through the lens of materiality. Moving beyond institutional and policy-centred narratives, the issue highlights how welfare ideals were shaped, negotiated and experienced through the built environment, infrastructures and everyday objects. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from urban and architectural history, conceptual history, and the history of experiences, the special issue demonstrates how materiality functioned as an active site where welfare discourses and practices intersected and where Nordic welfare states were made tangible in daily life. The articles of the special issue connect to three overarching research themes: the role of planning, infrastructure and architecture in forming welfare citizenship; the circulation of material representations that influenced domestic and international understandings of Nordic welfare; and the lived welfare state where citizens engaged with welfare through intimate and emotional encounters with materiality. Through case studies ranging from housing estates and subway systems to prams and baby boxes, the special issue adopts a multi-scalar perspective, revealing how materiality connected welfare processes across scales—from national planning regimes and transnational image circulation to the embodied, intimate encounters of everyday life.