Islam on the Outskirts of the Welfare State
The New York Times Magazine
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
Published: February 5, 2006
In few places on earth is the air fresher than in a Swedish housing project. Take Bergsjon, which sits five miles from the center of Sweden's second-largest city, the stately Dutch-built port of Gothenburg. Home to a Volvo plant and some of the world's biggest shipyards, Gothenburg was long an industrial powerhouse. Bergsjon was built between 1967 and 1972 to reward the workers who made it that. Bergsjon resembles the places Swedes love to retreat to in midsummer — quiet, pristine, speckled with lakes and smelling of evergreen trees — but it is only a short tram ride away from the city's giant SKF ball-bearing plant. The center has no cars. Its 14,500 people live in apartments set within a lasso-shaped ring road, on grassy hills that climb toward the country's rustic uplands. As Asa Svensson, a municipal coordinator for the development, notes, "It was planned for people who like to be in the country."
The Bergsjon housing project was built as a reward for Swedish industrial workers. Today, 70 percent of its residents were born abroad, or have parents who were, and at least 40 percent are on welfare. But now the shipyards are gone. The Swedish industrial workers Bergsjon was planned for no longer live there. Today it is inhabited mostly by immigrants, many of them refugees, of a hundred nationalities. Seventy percent of the residents were either born abroad or have parents who were. The same goes for 93 percent of the schoolchildren. You see Somali women walking the paths in hijabs and long wraps and graffiti reading "Bosna i Hercegovina 4-Ever." A few years ago, the mayor of Gothenburg declared, "The prospects of turning Bergsjon into a normal Swedish neighborhood are almost nil."
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/magazine/05muslims.html
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
Published: February 5, 2006
In few places on earth is the air fresher than in a Swedish housing project. Take Bergsjon, which sits five miles from the center of Sweden's second-largest city, the stately Dutch-built port of Gothenburg. Home to a Volvo plant and some of the world's biggest shipyards, Gothenburg was long an industrial powerhouse. Bergsjon was built between 1967 and 1972 to reward the workers who made it that. Bergsjon resembles the places Swedes love to retreat to in midsummer — quiet, pristine, speckled with lakes and smelling of evergreen trees — but it is only a short tram ride away from the city's giant SKF ball-bearing plant. The center has no cars. Its 14,500 people live in apartments set within a lasso-shaped ring road, on grassy hills that climb toward the country's rustic uplands. As Asa Svensson, a municipal coordinator for the development, notes, "It was planned for people who like to be in the country."
The Bergsjon housing project was built as a reward for Swedish industrial workers. Today, 70 percent of its residents were born abroad, or have parents who were, and at least 40 percent are on welfare. But now the shipyards are gone. The Swedish industrial workers Bergsjon was planned for no longer live there. Today it is inhabited mostly by immigrants, many of them refugees, of a hundred nationalities. Seventy percent of the residents were either born abroad or have parents who were. The same goes for 93 percent of the schoolchildren. You see Somali women walking the paths in hijabs and long wraps and graffiti reading "Bosna i Hercegovina 4-Ever." A few years ago, the mayor of Gothenburg declared, "The prospects of turning Bergsjon into a normal Swedish neighborhood are almost nil."
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/magazine/05muslims.html
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