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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

Gothenburg: is the dream of a new city turning into a nightmare? 

Sweden’s second city is the site of Scandinavia’s largest urban development project. But there is rising concern that the costs outweigh the benefits, says David Crouch

Gothenburg: is the dream of a new city turning into a nightmare? 
The Karlatornet is now half-built but is running into problems. Photo: Adam Ihse/TT

Last week, residents in the area of Fågelsången (birdsong), a quiet street at the very heart of Sweden’s second city, woke up to read the following news: “Explosions at Fågelsången: On August 8, week 32, we start blasting around Fågelsången and are expected to be done by week 40. When blasting, for safety reasons, no one is allowed to go out, open their windows or be within the blasting area. We will work weekdays 7am to 5pm.” 

Blasting deep holes in the granite – along with sprawling roadworks – has been the reality for central Gothenburgers for the past four years, as a vast rail tunnel is being dug to link the current terminus with other parts of the city and enable smoother connections with other routes. The aim is to triple rail passenger numbers and eliminate traffic jams on the main road through the city, at a cost of 20 billion crowns (€1.9 billion).

This railway, known as Västlänken (the West Link), is not the only big construction project in the city centre. It is just the largest element in a gigantic scheme to revive the docks area along the river, which was destroyed by a global shipping crisis in the 1970s. The great rusting cranes opposite the opera house and the disused Eriksberg gantry are an important aspect of Gothenburg’s skyline and self-image. The areas on the north bank were also home to many recent immigrants and a byword for poverty. The city’s mayor famously, and shamefully, referred to it as “the Gaza strip”.

So in 2012 the city launched an ambitious plan. Christened Älvstaden, the RiverCity, municipal investment aimed to build an attractive, modern waterfront while creating tens of thousands of homes and jobs. It is by far the Nordic region’s biggest urban regeneration project. A YouTube video commissioned by the city authorities a few years later neatly sums up both the breathtaking scope of this vision and the exciting / brutal (choose your own adjective here) nature of the transformation it would bring: 

The RiverCity revolved around two flagship projects: a new bridge over the river, the Hisingsbron (Hisingen Bridge), combined with major new office developments right in the centre; and Karlatornet, Sweden’s tallest skyscraper, which would literally tower over Gothenburg like a beacon of modernity in a city that traditionally has had strict rules against high-rise buildings. 

Add to all this a proposed high-speed rail link with Stockholm, and you have a recipe for quite spectacular urban upheaval involving billions of tons of steel and concrete. Visit Gothenburg today and much of the city seems to have been turned into a building site. There is a forest of cranes, while smart new office blocks puncture the skyline – a genuine metamorphosis is under way.

But many Gothenburgers are either uneasy or downright unhappy. The RiverCity is a vanity project to gentrify the docklands, they say. Karlatornet’s 73 stories of luxury apartments will be a scar on the landscape and a symbol of Gothenburg’s new love affair with finance and real estate, a slap in the face for the city’s proud industrial values. Västlänken is a vit elefant, a costly project that will deliver questionable benefits, many believe.  

Opposition to Västlänken was such that a new political party, the Democrats, took 17 percent of the vote in 2018 with its headline demand to stop the project immediately. This caused a revolution in local politics, overturning decades of Social Democrat rule. 

And now the gloss on these big-ticket construction projects is starting to fade. Karlatornet was the first to run into trouble. For most of 2020 building work was at a standstill, raising the threat that this flagship of regeneration would be nothing more than an unfinished stump, after American financiers pulled out of the project. The new Hisingen Bridge is open to traffic, but its construction was fraught with setbacks and the final cost to the taxpayer is still unknown. “There has been an awareness from the start that this was a high-risk project,” one of the project’s bosses said ominously this spring.

RiverCity is more than two billion kronor over budget, and facing accusations of mismanagement that evoke Gothenburg’s old nickname of Muteborg, or Bribetown, after a proliferation of municipal companies in the 1970s led to conflicts of interest, with politicians sitting on company boards. Opponents of the scheme argue that in any case it is unlikely to solve any of the city’s fundamental problems, such as the ethnic segregation that has created immigrant ghettos in outlying suburbs.  

In May, Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter published leaked minutes from Västlänken management meetings in which one of the main contractors on the project said it would be delivered billions over budget and four years later than its official 2026 deadline – in other words, four more years of earth-shattering explosions, roadblocks and associated upheaval. With local elections only months away, the Democrats have taken out advertisements on billboards and in local media demanding that top politicians tell the truth about what is going on. For opponents of the scheme, this is exactly what they have warned of all along

Next June, Gothenburg will officially celebrate its 400th anniversary, postponed from 2021 because of the pandemic. Visitors will experience a city on the move, with pristine new motorways and sparkling office blocks. So for Gothenburg’s urban planners, there is light at the end of the development tunnel. In the case of Västlänken, however, they will be hoping that the light is indeed that of an oncoming train. 

David Crouch has lived in Gothenburg for nine years. He is the author of Almost Perfekt: How Sweden Works and What Can We Learn From It, a freelance journalist and lecturer in journalism at Gothenburg University.

Member comments

  1. It’s not just Gothenburg. Such urban schemes are going on all over Sweden, especially in communes governed by the same type of politicians. They are ill-conceived, over budget and have long delayed completion dates. Investors and contractors leave in frustration. Ghettos proliferate. Little, and not so little, Muteborgs exist all over Sweden protected by the Swedish constitution which gives central government no planning, fiscal or audit powers over local government. It is Sweden’s achilles heel which everyone talks about in private conversation but no politician wants to tackle.

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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

OPINION: Swedes, it’s time to embrace language barriers, not avoid them

In a recent article in Dagens Nyheter, journalist Alex Schulman praises the Danish coach of Sweden's football team for speaking English in press conferences. Wouldn't it be better to embrace the Danish-Swedish language barrier, instead of avoiding it, asks The Local's deputy editor Becky Waterton.

OPINION: Swedes, it's time to embrace language barriers, not avoid them

For most immigrants, language barriers are a fact of life. Whether that’s trying to decipher the syllables of a Swedish sentence as a new learner or being met with a blank stare when we try to order a coffee for the first time in Swedish, it’s a natural part of getting to know a new country.

Swedes, on the other hand, seem to find language barriers intensely awkward, doing whatever they can to either avoid them or pretend they don’t exist.

One example is a new learner of Swedish speaking a heavily accented or grammatically incorrect version of the language, which may be difficult to understand. Often, a Swede facing this scenario will switch to English or plough through the conversation pretending they understand the other person’s broken Swedish, either out of fear of offending or in order to save face. 

Neither of these solutions are really ideal, as they both deprive the new learner of Swedish a chance to improve, which perpetuates the language barrier itself, and can even make communication impossible if the person speaking broken Swedish doesn’t understand any English at all.

How will you ever learn that you’re saying something wrong in Swedish to the extent that it’s incomprehensible if everyone around you just pretends they understand you or never corrects you?

This also applies to pan-Scandinavian communication, where journalist and author Alex Schulman is firmly in the “switch to English” camp. 

In a recent article in Dagens Nyheter, Schulman mentions attending a book fair in Copenhagen, where he struggled to communicate with his Danish editor in the taxi from the airport. This inability to understand Danish only becomes more obvious when he gets up on stage for an interview in Danish.

“It was parodical, obviously. The interviewer asked questions, which I didn’t understand, and then I answered completely different things in Swedish, which she didn’t understand, in front of an audience who didn’t understand anything,” he writes.

He mentions this like it’s a funny anecdote – and to be fair, he might be exaggerating for comedic effect – but I can’t help but feel it would have been better for everyone if he’d just been honest about the language barrier in advance, instead of going all the way to Copenhagen to apparently waste the time of his editor, interviewer and audience by clearly not being able to communicate with them. 

Now, my issue is not that he can’t understand Danish – the two languages are considered mutually intelligible, but in reality many Scandinavians find it hard to understand each other without making any effort – but surely he knew in advance that they would be speaking Danish? 

Would it not have been better to say “hey, I’m not great at Danish, so you might need to speak a bit slower, or is it possible for you to repeat some of the questions in English?”, or to listen to a few Danish podcasts or radio shows in advance to get an ear for the language, instead of just pretending to know what everyone is saying?

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Isn’t the best response when meeting a language barrier working together to overcome it? 

I saw a great example of this in an unlikely place – the new series of Swedish gardening show Trädgårdstider.

Former host Tareq Taylor, a Swede, had to move to Stockholm last year and drop out of the show, which is filmed hours away in Skåne. His replacement is Danish chef and TV presenter Adam Aamann, who doesn’t speak Swedish. The other three hosts, Malin Persson, Pernilla Månsson Colt and John Taylor (no relation), don’t speak Danish, they speak Swedish.

The hosts of Trädgårdstider from left to right: Pernilla Månsson Colt, Malin Persson, Adam Aamann and John Taylor. Photo: Niklas Forshell/SVT

Of course, the group could have switched to English when Aamann was around, but in a preview for next week’s episode (Tuesday 8pm on SVT1 or SVTPlay), I found it refreshing how public broadcaster SVT has chosen to stand up for Scandinavian mutual intelligibility, with the Swedes speaking Swedish and the Dane speaking Danish (with Swedish subtitles for viewers at home, but it’s a start at least).

This isn’t without its issues – Taylor and Aamann have a moment of confusion when trying to figure out what different vegetables are called in each language – but instead of giving up entirely, they work together to overcome the barrier.

Sure, they use English as a helping hand in communication – Taylor, who is English, gives Aamann the English name of one vegetable when he realises Swedish isn’t working – but once they’ve figured out the issue, the pair switch back to their Scandinavian languages.

This also has an extra benefit for both of them, as not only do they get over the linguistic hurdle, but in not switching directly to English they also learn the word for the vegetable in question in each other’s languages too, meaning that they won’t come across this particular language barrier with each other or with another speaker of Danish or Swedish again.

It also takes the audience into account – instead of switching to English and alienating any viewers who don’t speak it, they stick to their Scandinavian languages and will hopefully increase the Swedish audience’s understanding of Danish, too.

In Schulman’s article, he describes his relief when the new Danish coach of the Swedish football team, Jon Dahl Tomasson, announced that he was planning to speak English, instead of Danish, in press conferences in Sweden.

“It was so refreshing, because suddenly, there he stood – a Dane who you could understand for the first time in your life.”

The new Danish coach of Sweden’s national football team, Jon Dahl Tomasson. Photo: Stefan Jerrevång/TT

“I’ve been so happy that I’m at the point of tears, because I think Tomasson’s decision could set a new standard, I think this will give Swedes confidence. We’re building a new relationship with Denmark now, and in that relationship the language we use is English. It’s a relationship where we understand each other for the first time,” he writes.

I’m glad Schulman can understand a Dane for the first time, but I think he’s missing the point somewhat.

If Swedes and Danes speaking their own languages actively tried – together – to understand each other when they come across language barriers between the two languages instead of immediately turning to English, they’d be much better at actually understanding each other’s language in the first place, and the shared work to overcome the barrier would probably bring them closer, too.

English can be a useful tool to aid comprehension, but if you just switch to it whenever you come across the smallest amount of resistance in a conversation, you’re perpetuating language barriers when you could be breaking them down together.

Language barriers are an opportunity rather than an embarrassing moment we should pretend to ignore. We’ll only learn how to speak to each other in a way that everyone understands if we’re honest with each other about the communication issues we have.

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