The Million Programme

The Swedish parliament decides that a million homes are to be built in ten years. It happens – with industrial methods, large cranes and large-scale suburbs such as Tensta, Rinkeby and Hammarkullen.

The housing shortage was solved, but the estates became controversial. Today the question is how to renew them rather than demolish them.

In the 1950s and 60s people moved on a large scale from the countryside to the towns, where industry needed labour. Birth cohorts were large, labour immigration increased and more and more people wanted to live in a modern flat of their own. Housing queues in the big cities were long, and many families still lived in cramped, outdated conditions. The Social Democrats under Tage Erlander had made housing a key issue, and in 1965 the Riksdag adopted the goal of building a million homes in ten years, in a country with fewer than eight million inhabitants. The state provided favourable loans, and the municipalities and their public housing companies were given a central role in planning and building.

The goal was reached. A large proportion of the homes were detached and terraced houses, but it is the large estates of blocks of flats that have become the symbol. Construction was industrialised: walls and floors were made as precast concrete elements in factories, and cranes running on rails often dictated that the buildings stood in long, straight rows. Areas such as Tensta and Rinkeby in Stockholm, Hammarkullen and Bergsjön in Gothenburg and Rosengård in Malmö were built with traffic separation, multi-storey car parks, large courtyards and a centre by the underground or tram. The flats were light and well equipped with bathroom, kitchen and often a balcony. Sometimes the first tenants moved in before schools, shops and planting were finished.

As early as the late 1960s the new suburbs came under harsh criticism. The media described them as desolate, large-scale and inhuman concrete environments, and in the early 1970s thousands of flats stood empty in some areas, as many people preferred to live in houses. The areas’ reputation affected who moved there, and over time several of them became marked by segregation. In the 1980s and 90s some were rebuilt with pitched roofs, new colour schemes and new entrances. Today many of the buildings are in need of renovation, and the question is how they can be renewed to save energy and raise quality without rents rising so high that residents are forced to move.