Stockholm is growing. The equivalent of a couple of busloads of people move to the city every day, in total 35,000 people annually, making it one of the five fastest growing urban areas in Europe. If the prognosis becomes reality Stockholm will overtake London as the fastest-growing European city by 2030.
The urbanisation trend is a global phenomenon, with projections that by 2050 75 percent of the global population will reside in cities. A lot more of the activity in the respective economies of various nations is becoming concentrated in the major cities, and in Sweden and Stockholm that trend is even more significant.
Forecasters are predicting that Stockholm will grow at twice the pace of Copenhagen and Zürich, and six times as fast as Paris from now until 2030. This obviously poses problems when it comes to an already-troublesome housing situation and infrastructure. It’s apparent that most people prefer to live in an urban environment, with many wanting to live in the desirable areas of the inner city. So what to do?
Here’s the debate. In the red corner we have the skyscraper romantics. Facing them, in the blue corner we have the traditionalists. The adversaries to building tall structures point out that they don’t offer a higher density and mean that instead the urban environment of the city centre must expand outside of what is today perceived as the inner city.
But lately there has been a clear penchant for planning and proposing new projects with very high buildings in Stockholm. The latest to gain a large traction is the Tellus Tower, a 75-storey building in the area of Telefonplan by Midsommarkransen. It’s a 225 metre-high structure that would house 340 one-to-three room apartments in what would become Northern Europe’s highest residential building. The building is targeted at a younger audience who have “great demands when it comes to space efficiency, flexibility and service.” The vision is that the tower would become the landmark of a new urban district dubbed Stockholm Creative District. An appealing name no doubt, although the creative community rarely gets attracted to expensive newly-built areas.
Peter Elmlund is part of a network of professionals within urban planning who congregate under the banner Stockholm Skyline. They try to gather all groups who are opposed to the ideas of skyscrapers in Stockholm and instead lobby for what they call good, wise urban planning.
He understands the underlying reasons for people wanting tall buildings.
“It obviously first sounds like a good solution to the city’s housing problems. But the fact is that you do not gain a greater density by building tall buildings. If you erect a tall building on one single piece of land, yes sure, but after that the connection between height and density stops. If you build taller buildings you need wider streets to attract the light you need at street level, you need more parking spaces etcetera. And the taller the building is, the greater the black body inside of it has to be – elevators, ventilation and so on – which eats up a lot of the space. Paris is a good example. Paris doesn’t have any high buildings, but it still has the same density as Manhattan.”
He thinks the reason we hear so much about it now is because there is an election coming up soon, and that for politicians and the media more housing is obviously a good sell – to most people, high buildings automatically sounds like more apartments. Then he points out the slight detail that Tellus Tower and such projects are only economically viable if they get subsidized – if either a building company or the city see a value in having a spectacular building as a landmark and are prepared to take the economic loss.
Anders Gardebring is one of the founders of YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard), an organisation started by four young men with an interest in urban planning who met on a internet forum. They got together and the organisation now boasts 5,000 members. He claims they didn’t know that much at first but that they have learned an awful lot about the problems you face when it comes to city development. They want to discuss these questions from a citizen perspective.
“Over the last few years we have had several politicians stating that we should build a tall building at location A or location B. We need to get away from politicians pointing at possible locations and instead adopt a liberal view to building taller houses in general. Obviously there are locations where you have to be careful, close to Gamla Stan is one example, it’s an important location economically.”
Gardebring agrees somewhat with Elmlund when it comes to density. “I agree that there is a misconception about building a dense city with really tall buildings. If you only think about height you risk creating something like the Million Programme scheme of the 60s and 70s. You won’t get an attractive environment to live in and you won’t achieve very high density either. The classic inner-city environment with our six to seven-storey buildings has a higher density. But the argument that you have to make the streets wider in between the buildings is incorrect. That stems from modernism and the 30s and 40s when we didn’t have toilets, elevators and lighting in the houses and there were still horses on the streets. Now that our society is different a large part of that argumentation is no longer valid.”
“Another thing is that during a large part of the year, at our latitude much of the street is always in the shade anyway. So it might not make such a difference if some buildings are 30 storeys high. But our entry point in this discussion is that we need to start at ground level and build cohesive urban environments. And then when you have that in place you can build higher structures in that context. Compare Kungstornen, which no one would want to tear down, with the Wennergren Center which stands isolated, surrounded by traffic. Wennergren Center is modernist while Kungstornen are examples of classic urban planning. The latter is primarily what we are talking about.”
Gardebring doesn’t want to draw any conclusions regarding the proposed Tellus Tower yet. “It’s at such an early stage. But where you really have the opportunity is in new city developments close to the city centre. It would be a lot more controversial within the inner city because you would probably have to tear down older buildings. But there are spaces to develop – at Marieberg there are great possibilities to complement the existing developments, at the northwestern part of Kungsholmen and in Norra Stationsområdet, Hagastaden. we would have loved to have seen the originally planned height kept as it was.
“There are examples in the city centre too, for example Sergels Torg that already has a very modern city-scape, and by the Central Station. I think there’s a point in manifest that this is Stockholm’s most central location.” “Stockholm is no museum, we should develop along with the times. We can obviously point to individual objects that we want to preserve. But not a whole city.”
As a counterargument Peter Elmlund points towards Stockholm’s iconic skyline. ”Stockholm is unique with its low skyline. That naturally has a value. Do we really believe that Stockholm becomes more attractive when we look like other cities? What I have learned about branding is that you have to nurture whatever is unique. We cannot solve the lack of housing within the inner city, there simply isn’t enough space. We will have to accommodate those needs outside of what is considered the inner city today. The question should be how we can build a thriving urban environment outside the city centre limits of today.” A statement Anders Gardebring is in agreement with.
Renowned Danish architect, urban design consultant and champion of the human scale Jan Gehl – who is the one who pedestrianized New York’s Times Square – is more concerned about the life in between the buildings than the buildings itself.
He has drawn a simple conclusion. ”If you live above the fifth or sixth floor you cannot see your kids when they’re running around and playing in the backyard which naturally means that you don’t let them out on their own.”
“Architecture is not about form, it’s about the interaction between form and life. The form is so easy to communicate and study – what is the surface, the material etcetera. But the life, and the interaction is complicated to study and evaluate. But the key is to find out how it influences life.”
