As a metropolitan area that stands on 14 interlocking islands; a mosaic-like topography of land, lake and waterway stitched together by 50 uniquely-designed bridges, it's hard to imagine any other city that makes better use of its natural assets than Stockholm. The vibrant urban environment has long been the capital and most populous city of Sweden, the largest of the Scandinavian nations. Lying on the country's east coast, the capital city is home to almost a quarter of the nation's population, constituting it as the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. However, for all its size, Stockholm seems to merge urban construction and wide-open rural elements in a way that benefits the people at a human scale. In the entire metropolitan area, over 30% of the city is made up of waterways and another 30% is made up of park spaces, leaving a small area for growth, developing a dense and efficient infrastructural system for urban construction. More importantly, history plays an important role in the civic expression - grand pedestrian boulevards, immense civic structures, extensive park spaces and continuously treaded waterfronts - all enforce the sense of romantic expressionism to Sweden's rise as a major European power in the 17th century, both culturally and politically.
View of Stockholm's waterfront
Stockholm's Gamla Stan (Old Town)
Gamla Stan's waterfront
The Royal Palace (right) and Cathedral of Stockholm (left)
Gamla Stan (referred to as the 'Old Town') is Stockholm's oldest district, site of the Royal Palace and Parliament House, and origin to the city's urban growth. It lies at the heart of the historic city, standing on a strategically situated island in the middle of the narrow bottleneck channel between the salty Baltic Sea and the inland freshwater lake of Malaren, the third largest lake in Sweden. As a fortified merchant town during the thirteenth century, both north-south trade routes by land and the east-west routes by sea could be controlled, developing strong economic and cultural linkages with other cities. Today, Gamla Stan is not regarded as a perfectly preserved medieval townscape, but the island nature of the settlement, its small area and its crowded layout have spared Gamla Stan from too much modernization. What remains today is an enclave of colorful old stone buildings dating from the 15th to the 18th centuries. You can wander at will through the Old Town without getting lost, as you are never far from the waterside or a bridge to re-orient yourself.
Erik Gunnar Asplund's Stockholm Library
Ragnar Östberg's Stockholm City Hall
Stockholm Waterfront Congress Centre by White Arkitekter
In the early 20th century, a nationalistic push spurred new architectural expressions in the city inspired by medieval and renaissance ancestry that would lead to an emphasis in modernist construction, characterizing the new language and development of the city until today. An example, north of Gamla Stan is Norrmalm, the business and commercial district. This is the heart of the modern city – glass, steel, and concrete, along with a clear Swedish design ideology - all present throughout the area with a cityscape of towering glass buildings, emphatic shopping malls, busy streets and traffic-free concourses that satisfy the demands of both vehicles and pedestrians. Simultaneously, the city's industrial and economic aspirations had grown at the beginning of the century, drastically transforming the city into an important service center and increasing the urban population through immense immigration, making less than 40% of the city residents Stockholm-born. The population boom led city officials' attention toward a growing housing shortage, with new aesthetic ideals developing in architecture that promoted a new modern functionalist form adopted from mass-production construction. With the introduction of the Stockholm metro in 1950, new state-subsidized suburban housing developments would continue to sprout up around the city like a string of pearls along the transit lines. Many of these areas would later be criticized for functionalist planning ideals - dull, unattractive, unsafe - built mainly out of concrete construction. At the same time, the city's inner city was undergoing radical urban renewal plans that sought to adapt increasing vehicular traffic and demands of the modern age, while controversially demolishing large areas of existing properties to make room for new development projects, leading to a segregated population and urban gentrification.
City infrastructure
Looking down Stockholm's Hamngatan street toward Royal Dramatic Theater
The major pedestrian street of Drottninggatan
The planning schemes of modernism were starting to be questioned by public officials by the end of the 20th century. With Danish and other examples as models, a reorientation towards small-scale housing took place, where 'dense and low' became the dominating principle in city planning. In a new plan for Stockholm, the idea of density in urban planning was emphasized with the future expansion of the city, with focus on developing on previously established land, preserving valuable green areas, developing around the edges of the city, and redeveloping older industrial areas into denser urban districts. The development inwards has led many politicians to generally abandon their former difference with regard to high-rise development in the inner city of Stockholm, threatening the city's public perception of well-established architectural unity and low profile nature.
