Sweden's Strong-Handed Urban Planning

The conference I am attending in Sweden does not directly address Swedish issues, so I cannot satisfy those readers who have asked for comprehensive comments on the current state of the Swedish model.

But the location of this conference in the industrial town of Avesta, about 2 hours north of Stockholm, does allow for some casual observation that offers at least some glimpses.

Avesta is a steel-making center of about 15,000 inhabitants.

Compared to its American or British equivalents, the town remains surprisingly stable and solid. The works remain in business in new modernized premises. (The conference takes place near the original 19th century buildings, now conserved as an historical site.)

Except for splashes of graffiti along the pedestrian underpasses beneath the major road, you don't see much industrial blight. The town does not look especially prosperous, but the shop windows along the main drag are all occupied, although in many cases by what look like some kind of state social welfare agencies. The town's bored young people congregate in the evenings with a couple of skateboards in the town's central square. The pay phone in the square is notably not vandalized.

To a North American eye, the town looks drab and uniform. Commercial signage outside the central square is minimal and unilluminated. The biggest store in town is the social-democratic "cooperative." I counted two unappealing pizzerias, a couple of beer gardens, one off-putting little bakery and coffee shop, and two Thai restaurants struggling against the all-pervading local disregard for self-presentation.

Almost all the housing takes the form of four-storey apartment blocks, very similar to one another, aligned away from roads inside a network of pedestrian lanes. To judge from the well-cared-for gardens around some (but not all) of them, they are coop rather than state housing. They look exactly like what the old East Germans would have built had they had more time, taste, and customer responsiveness. A few 19th century farmhouses still stand at the crossroads of secondary roads, and I saw one very small subdivision of single-family rowhouses.  Otherwise, the housing shows the tight hand of the labor movement and the social democratic state.

The most visually arresting thing to the North American eye: there is no suburban strip. The main road is lined with low-rise apartment blocks about half way out of town. Then the housing stops and the highway is lined with pines, shielding large industrial and railway operations just off the road. Then you come to the big roundabout that delimits the town. At the roundabout is a huge gas station, and across the way, a Swedish equivalent of a Home Depot. That's it. No McDonald's, no Arby's, no Sizzler's, no suburban shopping strips, no fireworks stores, no sad little strip joints. It's the forest and the river and the highway, period.

There are no such outlets inside the town either.

You strongly get the impression that the restraint is due to planning controls, not lack of consumer demand. The town is planned within an inch of its life. I went for a midnight run on the pedestrian trails leading away from the hotel on the central square. Not once did I have to cross an arterial road at grade. They paths go under major roads and highways, and the underpasses are wide, bright and (in some cases) refaced with new materials to repel graffiti. They lead past playgrounds, little calisthenics stations and to the town's big municipal swimming pool. It might seem bizarrely unnecessary in such a small town, but passenger cars are banned from about a dozen square blocks at the town's commercial center.

Again that effect: East Germany but with more money, better taste, and less disregard for the wishes of local people.

More to come…