LUDA selected in the City:
Augustenborg

 

Size:
33 ha²:
No. of Inhabitants:
3188

Location and Boundaries:
LUDA area is located outside of the City Centre, in the Southeastern direction from the City Centre, located between 2 main roads directing out of the City. The continental railway is in near vicinity.

Urban Organization and Main Functions:
Housing and industrial estate

Population Structure and Dynamic:

A total of 3188 inhabitants by January 2003 are living in 1779 flats. The majority of the households consist of one single person, 61 %. The dominant age group are persons aged between 25 and 44 years old. 29 % of the households consists of pensioners, 12 % of the households are families with children. The total population has been declining from the highest total in 1961, 6 302 to mid nineties, the population has been increasing again since the year 2000. Movement within the area has been decreasing from 24 % in 1997 to 2 % 2003. The employment rate is 48 % of the population between 20-64 years of age. Official unemployment figures are 8 %, in addition 6 % is employed in labour market measures. The average disposable income was 85 000 SEK in 1997, increased to 125 700 SEK (2002). (190 500 SEK is the median average disposable income in the city) Financial support from social office or other sources is given to around 25 % of the household. 51 % of the inhabitants are born in a country outside Sweden, an additional 11 % has immigrant parents.

Main LUDA’s Problems (social / political / economical / ecological):
Segregation, unemployment (decreasing since 1997, employment rate risen from 35 % to 48 %), degeneration, low status, low income, traffic, flooding of cellars.

Reasons for Neglect:
Urban decay has begun in the early 70-ties, due the economic recession (unemployment, decreased work opportunities in the shipyard industry, ugly image of the district)

Additional Biography :
”If all the cookers of Augustenborg were piled on top of each other”, boasts the first booklet about Augustenborg from 1950, ”then the tower would be fifteen times higher than the steeple of Petri Church in Malmö. If all the bathtubs were placed end to end they would stretch from the Central Station to Nobel Square, and the floor area is the equivalent of a five metre wide road of parquet and linoleum from Malmö to Lund.”

The same booklet proudly dedicates a whole page to a description of the district heating system under the title Three Tonnes of Coal per Hour. Milk shops, grocers, butchers, bakers, tobacconists, shoe shops, toy shops and even a self-service food shop were amongst the services for the new residents.

Such new-fangled luxuries were one of the proud boasts of one of the first housing estates built in the new post-war housing policy in Sweden. New spacious homes with modern facilities and a high quality living environment were the foundation of the new Sweden that was to rise up from rural and urban poverty.

A new school, park and football pitches were planned, apartments were spacious and light, numerous playgrounds were sited next to the homes and cellars housed numerous community groups. Augustenborg became a symbol for the new modern era in Sweden, drawing study visits from home and abroad.

Augustenborg was designed by Riksbyggens architect bureau in Stockholm for the newly started Malmö City Housing Company Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary company of the City of Malmö. Work started in February 1948 and the housing estate was complete in 1952.

Many of those who moved into Augustenborg were young families from small apartments elsewhere in Malmö, often in a poor state of repair with few facilities. Those who remember the Augustenborg of the ’50s and ’60s recall the children and all the activities going on locally – the football club, the cinema, the wrestling club, some of the small gang wars with surrounding neighbourhoods and other colourful reminisences.

As the housing programme intensified into the late ’60s and early ’70s, however, things started to change. The largely two bedroomed flats of Augustenborg, once considered so spacious, had now been surpassed by the more modern tower blocks with three and four bedroomed apartments. Attempts were made to modernise the district with laundry rooms in each building and the closure of the local boiler house and incinerator so proudly opened in the ’50s. But a migration from Augustenborg left empty apartments and increasingly a sense of abandonment prevailed. Augustenborg had left the limelight and became a forgotten corner of the city nursing a bruised history and a socially strained present.

New migration to Malmö in the ’80s and ’90s managed to increase the population and brought a new cultural diversity to the neighbourhood, although many of the social difficulties continued. Since the early ’90s, the MKB Housing Company has been working actively on the social and physical regeneration of the area. The EU’s URBAN programme has supported improvements in the area and further urban regeneration initiatives are currently taking place.

Ekostaden Augustenborg has ascertained a place for Augustenborg once more on the map of Malmö. The district has now become a leading example of environmentally adapted urban regeneration and the focus of attention once more from home and abroad.