Miljonprogrammet

Last night I was reading about the rise in urban slums throughout the world because of migration, which the author said was caused by global warming. Since we have been here in Sweden I have been curious to see a poor neighborhood and so far I have seen nothing that would fit my definition of "poor". I started searching the internet for anything to do with poor people and Sweden and slums and came across something that I find very interesting. In the 1950's Sweden was experiencing an extreme housing shortage and implemented something called the miljonprogammet ( or million program ). The goal was to add one million new homes to the country. During the 1960's an investigation in the housing situation took place and between 1965 and 1974 roughly 650,000 new homes were built. While these homes were of better quality the suffered in aesthetics. There is a neighborhood that I am going to visit that is a little of Stockholm called Rinkeby that I read serves as a good example of good intentions that have went poorly. There are two neighborhoods here in Uppsala that were also products of this time period, Gottsunda and Eriksburg. The above picture is an apartment in Eriksburg. While this isn't the most pleasing building to look at I can appreciate it as I appreciate I box of bolts at the hardware store, that meaning I appreciate the ingenious of mass production and solving a problem in the most efficient way. I plan to study this a bit further.