'Only half the story': The flipside of Sweden's egalitarian utopia
When freelance writer Anne Grietje Franssen moved to Sweden and Gothenburg, she had to adapt her utopian image of the country.
I would move to Sweden and life would be good. There was no other outcome: the Swedish idyll had been promised to me by the children books' author Astrid Lindgren.
In Sweden, I knew from an early age, a girl – in Lindgren's case, a Ronja – could decide to escape, on horseback, the dubious morals of her father and go live by herself in the forest. Sooner or later a red-haired boy would come by and together they'd make house in a cave, bathe in the river and live off the land. Or you'd become a free-spirited Pippi Longstocking in some colourful vilIa.
In any case: in Sweden, children were taken as seriously as adults and women were at least as independent as men. Ethnicity, status, gender or age were not decisive; only principles were.
When my Astrid Lindgren years were behind me and my image of Sweden was fed by references in (Dutch) media and politics, my youthful intuition appeared to be correct. Sweden really was the promised country, where refugees were welcomed warmly, where boys wore dresses and girls were encouraged to be wild, where higher education was free, waste recycled and the energy green.
The originally American 'alt-right' movement had made a half-baked attempt to undermine the idea of this Swedish paradise in the aftermath of the most recent refugee crisis, in the 2010s. Sweden had supposedly turned into a 'no-go zone', where, basically overnight, everybody venturing out into the streets was at risk of falling victim to one or another heinous crime.
It was an allegation that mostly provoked scorn outside these alt-right circles. Sweden, a no-go zone? Everyone knew that Sweden was the epitome of righteousness. According to the Reputation institute's index, Sweden ranks number one. "Just look at Sweden", is the go-to answer among Dutch, left-wing politicians, to questions on how to improve education, the environment, migration, equality – or anything else, really. Sweden is the righteous father who wants the best for all his children. Folkhemmet, it's called: the state as the home of the people. Everybody under its roof is taken care of.
It turned out not to be a complete lie.
Astrid Lindgren in a theme park dedicated to her novels, in 1999. Photo: TT
When the Dutch newspaper Trouw is looking for a Scandinavia correspondent in 2016, I have little hesitation. At the end of that year I move to Gothenburg – located centrally within Scandinavia – and find a room in a collective in Bergsjön, an area in the northeastern part of the city. It's the terminus of tram line 11.
At first there's surprise. On that tram ride from Gothenburg's city centre to my new neighbourhood I am reminded of my previous life in Queens, one of New York City's five boroughs, where I lived a few years earlier and from where I commuted daily to Manhattan on subway line 7.
I would always get into a carriage full of people of colour, and would exit at Grand Central's underground maze in a stream of white men. That process would be reversed at the end of the day, when I saw, with each metro stop, the crowd of white turn into a crowd of non-white.
Surprise turns into slight disappointment upon arrival in Bergsjön. The area, named after its 'mountain lake', turns out to be one of Sweden's miljonprogram, 'million programme' neighbourhoods. Half a century ago, this program was the social-democratic response to a housing crisis. After World War Two, Sweden's population had grown steadily: there was the baby boom, the influx of migrant workers and refugees. The government decided to construct a million apartments within a decade, in order to fit everybody into the folkhem.
I get off the tram and see a long avenue with monotonous, high-rise apartment buildings that seem in need of a makeover. But I still look through my rose-coloured glasses, and reason: oh, so this is what equality looks like.
Bergsjön. Photo: Adam Ihse/TT
After this naively optimistic start, my Lindgren vision can only become blurred. There's too great a contrast with my Swedish friends who live in the mostly blonde city centre, the streets lined with stylish, wooden houses, cafes, vintage shops and yoga studios. They ask me jokingly – ha ha – if I'm wearing my bulletproof vest when I'm heading back home. But I refuse to bash 'my' Bergsjön. It's so green, so diverse!
But that's the problem. It's not diverse at all. Gothenburg is one of the most segregated cities in Europe. And there are few people who actively choose to live in a suburb like Bergsjön. You often end up there by lack of choice.
This is partly due to the layout of the housing market, urban geographer and segregation researcher Roger Andersson says. In a city like Gothenburg, around 80 percent of all housing is owner-occupied, the other 20 percent is rental. These rental properties aren't evenly spread across town, but are concentrated in clusters, usually in the city's outer margins.
And whereas it's fairly easy to buy an apartment in Sweden if you have a full-time job, a modest savings account, or a family that can assist financially, buying an apartment proves complicated if you have unstable work, live on benefits, or have no well-off family members who can help out. Then, chances are that you end up in one of those 'million programme' clusters like Bergsjön, whether you want to or not.
Besides ranking high on the reputation index, Sweden is also somewhere at the top of the list of OECD countries with the fastest growing inequality. Income inequality has quadrupled over the past 20 years, in contrast to the egalitarian view many people have of Sweden. For about 80 of the last 100 years, Sweden has been ruled by a centre-left, social-democratic government, which provided the country with its current reputation. The political rhetoric largely remains one of a cuddly and social Sweden – which, at times, proves to be far from the reality.
Sweden took a neoliberal turn in the 1980s, when the government decided to start experimenting with free market policies that had recently gained traction elsewhere. This development accelerated in the 1990s, when the country experienced a severe economic crisis.
"The series of political decisions that were made then," Andersson says, "led to the inequality we see in Sweden today".
The government decided to deregulate hitherto public services: the railways, the electricity grid, the postal service. Even the acclaimed school system was opened up to private players.
Another consequence of this neoliberal thinking was the privatisation of the housing market. Particularly recent migrants, who struggled to find work or lost their jobs, were driven to the million programme tracts. "Which then got the stigma of poverty," says Andersson. These suburbs became less and less attractive for the better-off to move to, and Swedish cities became increasingly segregated.
The process of segregation has put pressure on the available services in these areas, like schooling and healthcare, as inhabitants of poorer neighborhoods are generally lower educated and in worse health than the population in richer areas. So even if on paper everyone is entitled to the same, in practice the people who live here don't have access to the same resources as those in wealthier neighborhoods. Existing problems are often passed on from generation to generation.
A less measurable consequence of segregation is disillusion.
"People who live in these neighbourhoods can get the sense that they're ignored, that they don't get a chance," Andersson says. Which, at its worst, can lead mainly the young into criminality, thinking: "I have nothing to lose anyway", or "I have no access to any other means of income".
Brännö brygga. Photo: Roger Lundsten/TT
After a while, I became one of those people with a choice, and I chose to move away. Carrying a couple of suitcases I got on the 11 towards the other end of the line: Saltholmen. According to statistics, my life expectancy had increased by about nine years once I arrived at the opposite terminus.
I took a white-blue ferry to another existence. My new home is the car-free island of Brännö, where I moved into someone else's charming summerhouse. In the mornings I jump from the cliffs into the sea and in the evenings I discuss the latest island news with other island residents in the public sauna. We pick wild berries all through the end of summer and dance to live music on the Brännö brygga, the archipelago's famous pier.
This is it; this is the life I had moved to Sweden for. And yet my envisioned Astrid Lindgren utopia no longer exists. Because I now know this Swedish life I get to live is only half of the story.
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I would move to Sweden and life would be good. There was no other outcome: the Swedish idyll had been promised to me by the children books' author Astrid Lindgren.
In Sweden, I knew from an early age, a girl – in Lindgren's case, a Ronja – could decide to escape, on horseback, the dubious morals of her father and go live by herself in the forest. Sooner or later a red-haired boy would come by and together they'd make house in a cave, bathe in the river and live off the land. Or you'd become a free-spirited Pippi Longstocking in some colourful vilIa.
In any case: in Sweden, children were taken as seriously as adults and women were at least as independent as men. Ethnicity, status, gender or age were not decisive; only principles were.
When my Astrid Lindgren years were behind me and my image of Sweden was fed by references in (Dutch) media and politics, my youthful intuition appeared to be correct. Sweden really was the promised country, where refugees were welcomed warmly, where boys wore dresses and girls were encouraged to be wild, where higher education was free, waste recycled and the energy green.
The originally American 'alt-right' movement had made a half-baked attempt to undermine the idea of this Swedish paradise in the aftermath of the most recent refugee crisis, in the 2010s. Sweden had supposedly turned into a 'no-go zone', where, basically overnight, everybody venturing out into the streets was at risk of falling victim to one or another heinous crime.
It was an allegation that mostly provoked scorn outside these alt-right circles. Sweden, a no-go zone? Everyone knew that Sweden was the epitome of righteousness. According to the Reputation institute's index, Sweden ranks number one. "Just look at Sweden", is the go-to answer among Dutch, left-wing politicians, to questions on how to improve education, the environment, migration, equality – or anything else, really. Sweden is the righteous father who wants the best for all his children. Folkhemmet, it's called: the state as the home of the people. Everybody under its roof is taken care of.
It turned out not to be a complete lie.
Astrid Lindgren in a theme park dedicated to her novels, in 1999. Photo: TT
When the Dutch newspaper Trouw is looking for a Scandinavia correspondent in 2016, I have little hesitation. At the end of that year I move to Gothenburg – located centrally within Scandinavia – and find a room in a collective in Bergsjön, an area in the northeastern part of the city. It's the terminus of tram line 11.
At first there's surprise. On that tram ride from Gothenburg's city centre to my new neighbourhood I am reminded of my previous life in Queens, one of New York City's five boroughs, where I lived a few years earlier and from where I commuted daily to Manhattan on subway line 7.
I would always get into a carriage full of people of colour, and would exit at Grand Central's underground maze in a stream of white men. That process would be reversed at the end of the day, when I saw, with each metro stop, the crowd of white turn into a crowd of non-white.
Surprise turns into slight disappointment upon arrival in Bergsjön. The area, named after its 'mountain lake', turns out to be one of Sweden's miljonprogram, 'million programme' neighbourhoods. Half a century ago, this program was the social-democratic response to a housing crisis. After World War Two, Sweden's population had grown steadily: there was the baby boom, the influx of migrant workers and refugees. The government decided to construct a million apartments within a decade, in order to fit everybody into the folkhem.
I get off the tram and see a long avenue with monotonous, high-rise apartment buildings that seem in need of a makeover. But I still look through my rose-coloured glasses, and reason: oh, so this is what equality looks like.
Bergsjön. Photo: Adam Ihse/TT
After this naively optimistic start, my Lindgren vision can only become blurred. There's too great a contrast with my Swedish friends who live in the mostly blonde city centre, the streets lined with stylish, wooden houses, cafes, vintage shops and yoga studios. They ask me jokingly – ha ha – if I'm wearing my bulletproof vest when I'm heading back home. But I refuse to bash 'my' Bergsjön. It's so green, so diverse!
But that's the problem. It's not diverse at all. Gothenburg is one of the most segregated cities in Europe. And there are few people who actively choose to live in a suburb like Bergsjön. You often end up there by lack of choice.
This is partly due to the layout of the housing market, urban geographer and segregation researcher Roger Andersson says. In a city like Gothenburg, around 80 percent of all housing is owner-occupied, the other 20 percent is rental. These rental properties aren't evenly spread across town, but are concentrated in clusters, usually in the city's outer margins.
And whereas it's fairly easy to buy an apartment in Sweden if you have a full-time job, a modest savings account, or a family that can assist financially, buying an apartment proves complicated if you have unstable work, live on benefits, or have no well-off family members who can help out. Then, chances are that you end up in one of those 'million programme' clusters like Bergsjön, whether you want to or not.
Besides ranking high on the reputation index, Sweden is also somewhere at the top of the list of OECD countries with the fastest growing inequality. Income inequality has quadrupled over the past 20 years, in contrast to the egalitarian view many people have of Sweden. For about 80 of the last 100 years, Sweden has been ruled by a centre-left, social-democratic government, which provided the country with its current reputation. The political rhetoric largely remains one of a cuddly and social Sweden – which, at times, proves to be far from the reality.
Sweden took a neoliberal turn in the 1980s, when the government decided to start experimenting with free market policies that had recently gained traction elsewhere. This development accelerated in the 1990s, when the country experienced a severe economic crisis.
"The series of political decisions that were made then," Andersson says, "led to the inequality we see in Sweden today".
The government decided to deregulate hitherto public services: the railways, the electricity grid, the postal service. Even the acclaimed school system was opened up to private players.
Another consequence of this neoliberal thinking was the privatisation of the housing market. Particularly recent migrants, who struggled to find work or lost their jobs, were driven to the million programme tracts. "Which then got the stigma of poverty," says Andersson. These suburbs became less and less attractive for the better-off to move to, and Swedish cities became increasingly segregated.
The process of segregation has put pressure on the available services in these areas, like schooling and healthcare, as inhabitants of poorer neighborhoods are generally lower educated and in worse health than the population in richer areas. So even if on paper everyone is entitled to the same, in practice the people who live here don't have access to the same resources as those in wealthier neighborhoods. Existing problems are often passed on from generation to generation.
A less measurable consequence of segregation is disillusion.
"People who live in these neighbourhoods can get the sense that they're ignored, that they don't get a chance," Andersson says. Which, at its worst, can lead mainly the young into criminality, thinking: "I have nothing to lose anyway", or "I have no access to any other means of income".
Brännö brygga. Photo: Roger Lundsten/TT
After a while, I became one of those people with a choice, and I chose to move away. Carrying a couple of suitcases I got on the 11 towards the other end of the line: Saltholmen. According to statistics, my life expectancy had increased by about nine years once I arrived at the opposite terminus.
I took a white-blue ferry to another existence. My new home is the car-free island of Brännö, where I moved into someone else's charming summerhouse. In the mornings I jump from the cliffs into the sea and in the evenings I discuss the latest island news with other island residents in the public sauna. We pick wild berries all through the end of summer and dance to live music on the Brännö brygga, the archipelago's famous pier.
This is it; this is the life I had moved to Sweden for. And yet my envisioned Astrid Lindgren utopia no longer exists. Because I now know this Swedish life I get to live is only half of the story.
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