City Case Description: Lund, Digital Inclusion & Democracy for Libraries

How does “prototyping” work?

This City Case Description is the outcome of a policy prototyping exercise within a city ecosystem.
Once the ekip research team has explored a policy area and its connection to cultural and creative
industries (CCIs) and innovation, we ask: what would this mean in a local city context?

Together with local stakeholders, we test how a draft policy recommendation might stimulate innovation. Using Portfolio Sensemaking, stakeholders simulate an innovation portfolio, analyse the strengths and gaps of the local support system, and identify what resources are needed to realise the portfolio.

Lund Context & Area of Focus

Lund is a city with deep academic tradition and strong civic values. Home to one of Scandinavia’s oldest universities and a network of public libraries with a clearly articulated democratic mandate, Lund has both the infrastructure and the institutional ambition to address one of the most pressing challenges of our time: digital inclusion.

Under Sweden’s Library Act, public libraries are mandated to promote democratic society through knowledge dissemination and free opinion-forming. They are specifically charged with focusing on those groups in society who need the most support.

Yet the pace of digitalisation is creating enormous pressure. Many people no longer have the capacity to manage their everyday digital obligations — banking, healthcare, taxes, transport. When citizens cannot manage them alone, they increasingly turn to the library.

The library has become the last resort for the problems created by a digital society not designed with all its users in mind. Banks, health services and tech companies build digital systems and outsource the consequences to libraries when those systems fail their users.

In an era of disinformation and polarisation, libraries face deeper questions too: how to support media and information literacy while remaining neutral? How to help citizens not only use digital tools, but critically evaluate them? These are not questions libraries can answer alone.