I was invited by Mareld to contribute a text on their project Jubileumsparken to the book Wildness in the Heart of the City. To write it, I travelled to Gothenburg and stayed for several days in a hotel located directly on the site. Over those days the park kept changing. From a crowded, sunlit weekend to quieter cloudy weekdays. Periods of collective leisure were followed by the less visible processes of maintenance and care, without much ceremony. 

Beyond the variety of uses, the internal structure of the project was immediately legible: playscape, waterfront, utilities, planting contours, and the Shoreline Park. They did not operate on the same terms. The playgrounds and waterfront announced themselves as new—precise, resolved, and still slightly rigid. The Shoreline Park resisted this clarity. It felt less authored, more exposed to what was already there. As if the existing landscape had retained its own language, its own rhythm, and was allowed to speak more openly.

I was familiar with the project, but had little sense of how the book would take shape before receiving it. Rather than addressing my own contribution, Unframing Landscape, I focus here on the adjacent texts that reflect the design process, which together make a compelling case for what a landscape architecture project and the responsiveness of the design process can be in the 21st century.

The book does not attempt to smooth the project into a coherent narrative of self-declared success, frozen forever. Instead, it assembles accounts that stay with elements often treated as secondary. Several contributions begin with what was already there: materials, ruderal vegetation, soil conditions, and spontaneous uses. Others focus on prototyping as a sustained practice—how to stage it, how to schedule it, what can be carried forward, and what does not stick.

A particularly instructive thread in the book runs through the accounts by Anna Tidefelt and Malin Finlöf, whose long involvement in Jubileumsparken foregrounds what they call relational management. Here, prototyping is less about objects than about building and sustaining relationships: with schools, children, elderly visitors, municipal departments, and NGOs. Temporary constructions such as Play Mountain or Näsan i blöt are described as accumulative social devices rather than isolated installations. The book shows how scaling up from small experiments required negotiation across multiple administrative and technical regimes, and it does not conceal the cost, stress, or uncertainty of this approach. In this sense, it is a book about continuities and their rearticulation—about how they come to be recognised, over time, as a project.

Throughout the book, this process unfolds across multiple layers of design, without a clear beginning or end. As reported by Mareld, the initial competition brief did not even define the borders of the site. This pre-unframed condition proved productive. It introduced, from the outset, the necessary labour of identifying boundaries: what constitutes the site, which processes run through it or have run through it, how it relates to its wider urban and infrastructural context, to the lineage of European harbour cities, and ultimately to planetary ecologies. In this sense, landscape appears as something inherently unframed; spatially, temporally, epistemologically, and experientially. And at the same time proves that framing, the scape, is always a cultural by-product, limited to the capacity of human perception.

Other sections trace how the project addressed soils, contamination, and material reuse. Rather than presenting remediation as a hidden technical layer, the book explains how vegetation, redistribution of soils, and selective excavation were used to improve conditions. Material choices of concrete, steel, blasted rock, compacted gravels, and reclaimed cobbles are discussed as mediations between contamination limits, durability, maintenance, and the ambition to sustain a sense of urban wildness. The result is a legible coexistence of roughness, repair, and careful redistribution.

Two further contributions sharpen this logic. The collaboration with Atelier le Balto, whose practice often involves direct manual engagement with the site, offers an insight into how hands-on experimentation (planting, testing, adjusting on site), can be sustained within a large, post-industrial landscape dominated by hard surfaces and heavy structures. Such practices, familiar from small-scale or temporary contexts, are shown operating here at an infrastructural scale.

Another striking contribution documents the development of custom playground equipment by New Order Arkitektur. The playground is treated as an artistic and exploratory topography that succeeds in introducing custom play structures, structures that require extensive negotiations around safety, certification, and durability.

Further chapters address the open classroom, reuse strategies, and circular resource flows. Trees relocated from other redevelopment sites in Gothenburg, reused metal cladding, recycled paving stones, and blasted rock are described as material continuities of the site.

What I find particularly productive is that the book refuses to present a flawless process or a frictionless narrative. Many project-based books in the profession still do. In Jubileumsparken, such constraints and challenges are documented: budget and regulatory limits, technical difficulties, and other unresolved tensions. In this sense, Wildness in the Heart of the City decisively moves away from becoming just a nice coffee-table book. It is closer to a collective logbook of those negotiations, compromises, and learned capacities.

Taken together, Jubileumsparken and its reflection through the book offer Gothenburg something more durable than a celebratory waterfront park. They establish a benchmark for how under-activated waterfronts might be adapted as urban life continues under climate pressure. The reflection comes at a good moment, as Gothenburg still has many opportunities to improve its waterfronts.

For the international professional community, they do not provide answers so much as reframe questions: how to work with temporality, how to design through prototypes, how to integrate ecological and social processes, how to accept the messiness of public space production in the Anthropocene without nostalgia, romanticism or design populism. The book gains relevance beyond Gothenburg by showing how the design team dealt with specificity and locality in concrete design decisions.