Growing up on the Swedish seaside, I had a five-minute walk to four open learning facilities – not counting the library and the youth center. It was very Christopher Alexander.

One of the premises was an abandoned church that my friends and I used as a recording studio; we'd renovated it ourselves with funding from a study association. There we played distorted pop. In another, I learned French from an émigré of Montpellier. We arranged public lectures – once, to our great surprise, we even managed to book then general secretary of the United Nations Ban-Ki Moon for a lecture in Uppsala. I analyzed Soviet cinema with a group of whom an unsettling number sang Sång för Stalin before the screenings.

Since leaving Sweden, I have realized that not everyone grows up like this. And I miss it. In fact, if the whole of Sweden was about to burn down and I could only save one thing, I might grab just folkbildningsrörelsen.

Folkbildningsrörelsen: that is the name we have for this movement of self-organized study groups, resource centers, maker spaces, public lectures, and free retreats for personal development.

These types of things exist in other countries too – but not at the same scale. Or even close.

To get a sense of how comprehensive folkbildningsrörelsen is, it helps to remember that Sweden has a population roughly comparable to New York City. If NYC had as many free resource centers per inhabitant as the municipality where I grew up, Manhattan would look like this:

I was going to do all of New York but my hand started hurting from making all these dots, so I only managed the tip of Manhattan.

At every other intersection, there would be a few rooms where you could go in and get some money to buy literature or access tools you needed. (In practice, the resource centers in cities tend to be lumped together in larger units, but the map still captures a lived reality for the 7.5 percent of Sweden's population who regularly take part in study associations.)

Experientially, the spaces I have been part of have felt more like niche internet forums than schools. There were plenty of trolls, witches, and freaks – but we were also able to sustain a depth of conversation which was out of scope at school. When I entered university, seminars often felt like play-acting in comparison. In our often quite dilapidated buildings (as in inter...

Erick Guan

Erick Guan