A durational art project was the subject of an extensive and highly complex visual essay that accompanied the critical contextualisation of a the work in book Public Enquiries, that was also informed by three symposia in 2015 and 2016. Public Enquiries: PARK LEK and the Scandinavian Social Turn is a book concluding on these symposias, published in Fall 2018. It describes and critically contextualizes the complex and multidimensional artwork PARK LEK by Kerstin Bergendal, that contested, and ultimately transformed, the local government processes used to reshape a segregated urban area outside Stockholm. The book, of which the visual essay comprises the major component, situates the project within wider debates on the turn to socially engaged art practice, critical urbanism and processes of local democracy in the era of neoliberalism. It makes an argument for the political agency of artistic practice through attending to different genealogies of practice and challenging the easy rhetoric of instrumentalisation. Public Enquiries employs Bergendal’s practice as a point of departure to develop a range of new critical interventions, breaking new ground in the critical and theoretical response to the social turn in contemporary art. It also examines the role of the artist in the context of public space, design constructs and social platforms, ultimately suggesting that PARK LEK can be seen as a blueprint for the agency of artistic practice in reconstructing local democracy worldwide.