We study the \(L^2\) -gradient flows, \(\partial _t u-\operatorname {div}(\textrm{D}f(x,\mathbb {A}u))=0\) , of functionals of the type \(\int _{\Omega }f(x,\mathbb {A}u)\,\textrm{d}x\) , where f is a convex function of linear growth and \(\mathbb {A}\) is some first-order linear constant-coefficient differential operator. To this end, we identify the relaxation of the functional to the space \(BV^\mathbb {A}\cap L^2\) , identify its subdifferential, and show pointwise representation formulas for the relaxation and the subdifferential, both with and without Dirichlet boundary conditions. The existence and uniqueness then follow from abstract semigroup theory. We further show that our solutions can be obtained as limits of the corresponding flows with p-growth as \(p\searrow 1\) .
