Stockholm 19-23 September

The first thing I saw on landing at Arlanda airport was an Ethiopian Airways plane, which somehow set an appropriate tone for the second stage of my travels. As I expected, getting around was easy and straightforward. There was someone helpful on hand to assist with an unfamiliar ticket machine, the bus driver announced in Swedish and in English how long the journey would take to get to the city centre and the name of each stop was read out and visible on a screen beforehand. Always interesting to note what feels welcoming if you don’t know how a place or system works.

My accommodation, a flat in Södermalm (an island that forms the southern part of central Stockholm and which is where many of the fashionable restaurants and bars are located), turned out to be superb, so I commend the agency through which I booked it.

Armed with a map and public transport ticket, over the next two days I visited several  libraries in various municipalities around Stockholm, to find out more about the role of public libraries here in multicultural relationships. Quite apart from any other reason this has been interesting to get a sense of scale. Sweden’s total population is 9 million. Stockholm itself has a population of roughly 750,000 and Greater Stockholm, including the areas I visited, more like 1.5 million. Nowhere I visited was more than 40 minutes away from the centre of Stockholm by train, and most were about half that. Everywhere seemed green and leafy and near beautiful stretches of water.

But these neighbourhoods were a world apart from the centre of town and from my conversations, it was clear that many people do not move very far from their immediate locality in their daily life, for all sorts of reasons. In these areas, the percentage of immigrants is very high - I couldn’t help feeling that I was experiencing a Stockholm that is usually completely hidden from the casual visitor and which residents of areas such as the one I was staying in, might well only ever perceive via the media, rather than in person, unless they had a very specific reason to go there. 

Travelling with me was my excellent guide, Nick Jones, who was able to fill me in on some of the political and other background. Apart from shifts in national politics after the last election in 2006, there have also been shifts locally, and Nacka, a municipality to the south-east of Stockholm is one such place. Nick has recently been appointed head of the library in Forum Nacka, a shopping centre, which is currently undergoing major work so that it will double in size by next year, as will the library. 

All the libraries we visited in three different municipalities were either in a shopping/transport complex or co-located with cultural facilities, such as a theatre. In each case I was very struck with the degree of visibility and profile of the library as a component of the local landscape and all were clearly signposted. Some, in particular the library at Hallunda in the municipality of Botkyrka , had an emphasis on a substantial and impressive range of stock in different languages.

One library in Nacka, Fisksätra library, stood out amongst the visits I made however, because of the strong emphasis on the library as the hub of community life. This neighbourhood largely comprises housing developed in the 1970s as part of the “Million-Programme” which was intended to solve an acute housing shortage. This housing is now owned by Stena (yes, the same company that runs ferries).  It is an area surrounded by richer neighbours but whose own population reflects upheavals around the world, with residents from about 80 countries speaking 50 or more languages.  I met with Barbro Bolonassos, the head of the library, and her colleagues. That very morning they had received a visit from the Minister of Culture who had chosen this library to present her culture budget. We could have talked for hours…it was clear that Barbro is both inspired and a person with a mission, and despite setbacks and struggles, she has a very firm vision of the library as an “arena for democracy.” There is more about this in a recent article in the Scandinavian Public Library Quarterly. Walking around this small library was an uplifting experience because everyone using it, from tutors from the Red Cross to individual adults using computers to children choosing books, interacted with us and with each other in ways that suggested it was very much a community living room. But Barbro is clearly a key driving force behind it all.

I have also shared with about 20 staff from public libraries in Greater Stockholm a presentation about Welcome To Your Library in the UK, and I’m very grateful to Ali Reza Afshari, whom I had already met when he visited London a year or so ago, for setting this up and accompanying me. This took place in a building right next to the famous Gunnar Asplund library in central Stockholm, so I took the opportunity to go back later and visit both this building and the superb International Library next door. There are very big plans for a new library complex here in the next five or six years.

To my surprise, after my presentation, and in continuing discussion with Nick as we travelled around,  I discovered that there isn’t a framework or policy document along the lines, say of Framework for the Future, in Sweden. This means that so far as I understand it, there isn’t a national statement about the importance or role of public libraries in relation to social justice or social inclusion.  I have started to wonder about the differences between countries I have visited previously as part of this trip, and countries such as Sweden, where immigration and cohesion issues are a much more recent phenonomenon. My superficial impression is that public libraries are perceived very much as part of the cultural and leisure fabric of communities. The range of books, newspapers and other media available in different languages is highly impressive, but considering how libraries might contribute in a more proactive way to enabling people to feel part of society is newer terrain. As Barbro said in the article referred to above “Different kinds of local communities place different demands on their library.”