Malmö

Our journey started by the seashore on the west coast.

The coastline let appear the industrial memories which include abandoned quarries, docks, and dumps. They have all become sanctuaries of nature protection. Klagshamnsudden, a strip of land that was built during the construction of a small quarry to produce cement, and not far away, another crater, the legacy of an impressive mining activity that spanned over the twentieth century. Production closed in Limhamns Kalkbrott in 1994 and nature returned occupying the empty cavity and turned it into an oasis of protection for endangered species. Today the steep walls of the quarry protect the new ecosystem and force the urban sprawl to a halt. Along the edges, on each side, there are new construction. The city is pressing on the borders and does not seem to give up. 

The rural countryside is just a few steps away. The best fertile soil in Europe is there and counts the meters from the next construction site.

Summerhouses and vegetable gardens preempt the city. They occupy the residual spaces along the traffic routes, on the edges of the rings and of the highways’ connection roads.

Before us, the new district of Hyllie.
The international center was born as an extension of Copenhagen airport, an ongoing construction site located onto the rings’ system at the exit of the bridge. Shopping area, intermodal exchange platforms, hotels, and residential buildings: a dense, dry, immaculate place, absence of greenery, concrete. This is a landscape that thickens by superimposing the landmarks of yesterday and today in the new city’s skyline. 

Clear and sterile context, variations of semiprivate spaces: urban rooms, sudden contrasts between density and emptiness that open windows onto the countryside. 

More construction sites are not far away. Densification doesn’t happen in the urban center only but affects as well the small villages such as Tygelsjö, one of the many little towns scattered in the rural areas surrounding the municipality of Malmö.

The countryside is characterized by intensive agriculture, numerous greenhouses, and water collection tanks for irrigation purposes.
We are back on the edge of the outer ring. Vacation homes become spaces of informality and expression of colorful and exotic dreams. Unexpected places with small gardens and hidden passages. Spontaneous world.

And just beyond the wall of so much vagueness, a commercial platform materializes. Huge parking lots, large surfaces of asphalt, the commercial square is a parenthesis floating between the city and the countryside. Junctions, roundabouts, and the intertwining of streets bring back to the order of the residential districts. Lindeborg and then Lindängen: each step is a progression through different worlds which get closer yet remain distant.

We are at a new junction. The fast-food towers are bulwarks of conquest of our globalized world. In the space between Yttre Fosie and Jägersro density become looser, and the urbanization pattern let in large meadows, woods, and agricultural lands.

The track of a railway line emerges, and nearby mounds of earth herald something new on the way.

A lonesome mosque stands alone emerging from the bare earth. In the distance, the noises of the rides that animate the night of Jägersro; the footprints of a horse launched at a gallop and the sign of water, an oasis of peace and nature protection reminds us of the origin of this place.

Looking north just beyond the inner ring, we enter a new dimension. Rosengård is one of the many neighborhoods of the Million Program created by the Swedish government between 1965 and 1974 to guarantee everyone access to a good quality home at a reasonable price. Many of these large housing estates are locates on the two sides of the inner ring; they have marked the housing policy programs from the 60-70s onwards. Become part of the urban grid today, at a first sight they appear frozen in time, crystallized; aged prematurely in the physical structures, yet accommodate new and diverse in the population which changes over time. Details emerge and tell a more complex story, a life that unfolds behind the windows, in the public space where new businesses have settled over time. Green spaces are overwhelming and stretch as far as the eye can see.

So tall and imposing, the large blocks dominate the landscape beyond the barrier of the inner ring. Beyond the residential area, one enters an unusual and surprising animated milieu, where many of the city's industrial structures have been converted into small commercial businesses and cultural spaces incorporated into the urban fabric.

While modifying its assets, urban values and vocations, the urban pattern of the city has evolved. The development programs for the next twenty years are impressive and foresee an acceleration in the transformation of some of these inner portions of the city which represent the legacy of the industrial period. They have often become the ideal location for the creative and cultural industry, for young startups, spaces for the immigrant communities and the new generations of entrepreneurs, yet the renewal process put in motion is hastening the gentrification process. But the city’s growth has also speeded up the creation of new residential settlements and new commercial centers and spaces for businesses between the two rings, intensifying the occupation of agricultural land.

Following the path of our journey along the ring roads, it is again uncertainty of a landscape in transition towards new uses. Lonely agricultural areas abandoned greenhouses and warehouses for new distribution companies. More building sites in an area that is subject to an industrial development plan. We cross the edge of the city’s border and end in Burlov: trellis of a large electric power plant and a golf course and then back to Sege Park. Again, another large construction site where historical buildings are refurbished, and new developments embedded to experiment a new way to conceive a mixed urban district where shared services and facilities are combined with new housing provisions addressing different needs.

Treading the meadows on the edge with Burlöv, suddenly a trace of the railway track emerges from the ground and the industrial memory of the city materializes. We decide to follow it and arrive in Kirseberg. 

We approach the neighbourhood from the abandoned track which is quite popular among the locals for relaxing walks. Across a gate in the fence, we enter Lockstallarna: this is where a century ago the production of trains’ engines and wagons began. Impressive and overwhelming red-brick industrial structures have been preserved. The same materials and forms molded the village around it. Unlike the rest of the city, here to mark the urban landscape is the small scale of the buildings, shops on the ground-floor, places where the community meet. A peculiar atmosphere, a mix which makes this place different and unique compared to what we have seen along the way.

Tiny brick and colorful street houses make the district a world on its own: it is the "we, of the Kirseberg hills", the story of a neighborhood born in the early twentieth century. 

A consolidated space, with a history, and a dense architectural identity. Yet, this is also a place which seems on hold. Suspended, uncertain state between past and future. In the next few years, a massive new development is expected to bring into the district houses, working places and urban facilities questioning the relationship with the existing urban tissue and the integrated vision of the city ​​as an organic system.

But today the district is isolated like an island emerging from the urban space around it. In recent times cultural activities and the creative industries have reconquered this area reinventing it. Informality brought new meanings, while nature took over on this uncertain condition: just over the railway edge, birch trees bend their arms on still waters between the warehouses.

Seeking the sea we land once again on the coast. We move between Spillepengen and Frihamnen. There is no other way than approach the water from the large industrial port. This is where in the next fifteen years huge redevelopment plans will be carried out.
We have moved in semi-circle around the edges of the municipal borders, and we end our journey where the city meet the sea: the industrial harbor.

The outcome of this work has become a public exhibition hosted in the university's spaces and used by the City's Planning Department to involve the citizens in a critical, open, and participatory discussion.

A representation of the urban landscape’s transformation that aims to provide an overview and, at the same time, an opportunity, to steer a collective reflection on the contemporary city.