September 2013
I grew up just hours away from Copenhagen, but other than the odd visit to the Tivoli Gardens I seldom went there as a kid, leaving me only with a vague idea of what Copenhagen was. My only significant input was a wildly popular TV show called “Solstollarna” (approximately The Sun Fools) which portrayed Copenhagen people as being deeply weird and obsessed with the chocolate found on pastries.
When I got older, the picture changed. I heard about a place called Christiania which was basically lawless (they smoked marijuana! Imagine!), and when Swedes got too famous, they went to live in Copenhagen. It was bigger than Stockholm and it felt raw, real and a dangerous.
When I moved to Stockholm in 1996, Copenhagen disappeared from my consciousness. High on the Stockholm hype infused by Wallpaper’s Tyler Brûlé and other international players, I felt that Stockholm was the centre of the world, or at least Scandinavia. The following decade only confirmed this notion for me. Swedish artists exploded abroad – and they weren’t called Roxette and Ace of Bass anymore, they were called The Hives and The Knife. H&M collaborated with Madonna. Our crime writers sold so well abroad that David Fincher and James Bond would come and film here. And we started to be tech-savvy too, as Spotify and Soundcloud slowly began to revolutionize the music industry. Most Stockholmers could understand Copenhagen’s and Oslo’s frustration when tourist officials high-jacked the title “The Capital of Scandinavia” – as Stockholm was called in a slogan coined by Stockholm Business Region 2006 – but at the same time we secretly agreed.
Then something happened. The coolest of the cool in Stockholm – those who divide their time between doing art projects, DJ:ing, partying and launching clothing lines, and those who know all the right people and live life to its very full potential in this city – they started saying that Copenhagen was actually the place to be. That people there were warmer. The clubs better. The food tastier. The fashion scene more international and the hipsters hipper. And all this, while being more relaxed: Copenhagen is cool without really making the effort.
Which, of course, makes it even better. All this talk made me curious about Copenhagen, and as an adult I have now visited the city several times. So – is the Stockholm intelligentsia right? Let’s take a quick look at the facts. Stockholm is the slightly bigger city with just over 2,120,000 inhabitants compared to Copenhagen’s 1,954,000 in the greater metropolitan areas. Stockholm is also more innovative; it ranks number eight in the world in terms of patents per capita. But – Stockholm ranks significantly lower (19th) than Copenhagen (9th) on the Mercer quality of living city ranking. Moreover, a Copenhagen Big Mac costs only 67 percent of what you would pay in Stockholm, and public transportation is a lot cheaper.
Arts and leisure? For fashion lovers it’s no secret that CPH fashion week is considered Scandinavia’s most important fashion event; the restaurant Noma has been ranked the world’s best restaurant not less than three times, and while music festivals are dying out all over Sweden, Roskilde is standing proud. But perhaps more importantly – take a close look at a typical building, or street, in each of the cities and you’ll notice another type of difference. Where Stockholm is polished, grandiose and scenic, Copenhagen is cute, homely and rustic. Copenhagen fits right into the slow-food, locally-produced, rural, cozy trend. It’s a big city concealed as an adorable village. Stockholm, on the other hand, is more the perfect backdrop for upper-class brats.
I don’t think this is the beginning of the end of Stockholm cool. But let’s hope it’s a new start where we take down our arrogance a few notches. Because Stockholm is a wonderful city, but it’s not the only great city in Scandinavia. It might not even be the biggest for very much longer. Stockholm is the fastest-growing city in Europe, but we do share our spot with – Oslo.
