Housing and Communitybuilding in Stockholm, Botkyrka and SödertälYEAH!

This post was initiated by a question from my great new friend Anaïs from Paris who is working at Artfactories. She is organising a seminar on community building in november and asked me about some housing companies that I told her about when we met in Brussels.

What I told her is that some housing companies have started working in a different way as a result of seing them selves in a new way. What they seem to have realized is that they are not merely the builders and maintainers of housing but are actually community builders. Here are a few examples in the Stockholm region...

BotkyrkaByggen has started working with community theatre.

And AP fastigheter who are creating an international centre for scandinavian design at Telefonplan

Telge Fastigheter has a youth project called Hovsjösommar have started creating projects to give summerjobs to kids in a suburb of Stockholm.

Södertälje is interesting and has received alot of attention lately.

The last few months Södertälje has been invaded by international journalists because the town receives more Iraqi immigrants than the whole of North America put together. Södertälje welcomed 1,268 refugees last year of which 95% were from Iraq, a figure that is expecting to rise to 2,400 this year. Here it is appropriate to mention that Sweden took in over 9,000 Iraqi asylym-seekers, or almost 50% of all Iraqis coming to Europe. The USA in comparison took 202.

The block quote has been copy/pasted from another blog. Here is the great blogpost on Södertälje by Anna.

And Anaïs if you want some other interesting organizations for your seminar I strongly recomend you to get in touch with MIKU (one of the top youth oriented think&do tanks in Sweden)and jagvillhabostad.nu (a network for solving the housing problem in Sweden)

If you have more questions Anaïs, please feel free to call me.

/Obi-Wan Canole