Music, Space and Cultural Change: A Case Study of Hemgården, Lund

Sammanfattning

This study investigates the relationship between music, cultural practice and space at Hemgården, a grassroots youth cultural centre in Lund, Sweden. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with three staff members and four regular members, alongside an analysis of 104 music event posters from 2013 to 2026, the research examines how Hemgården has evolved in response to social and political change, how participants understand its role in local cultural identity, and how belonging is produced and experienced within it. Grounded in the geography of music, Lefebvre's spatial triad, Gramscian counter-hegemony theory, and intersectional frameworks, the analysis develops four thematic casings: space as a deliberate creation, memory and the meaning of decay, the inclusivity divide, and cultural ownership through genre. The findings show that Hemgården does not function as a passive container for cultural activity but rather as an active participant in it, continuously negotiated through the people who govern and inhabit it. Genre operates as a mechanism of community formation and cultural resistance, subcultural waves leave material and social traces across generations, and the aspiration to radical inclusivity remains in tension with structural and spatial realities. The study concludes that Hemgården represents a case of the counter-hegemonic cultural space: one that has sustained a principled alternative to mainstream cultural infrastructure across more than eighty years through the accumulation of small, consistent acts rather than grand institutional gestures.