Nature, Home, and Scenery: The Official Spatialities of Swedish National Parks

Abstract

In this paper I explore past and present ‘official’ spatialities of the Swedish national parks, and trace ways in which rhetorical mediation secures the naturalization and nationalization of park spaces. With the help of Lefebvre's writings on space, I argue that three interrelated spatialities constitute the abstract space of Swedish national parks: empty, organic, and optical space. Empty space embodies understandings of national parks as ‘pure’ nature, external to (modern) society. Organic space circumscribes modes of representation that link nature to conceptions of ‘Swedishness’. Through a multimedia dialectic of images, texts, and maps—the optical space of visual immediacy and ‘proof’—these spatialities are maintained and policed.