Rosengård, Malmö, Sweden

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Rosengård, Malmö, Sweden

Words by: Bence X. Szechenyi

I felt the need to visit Sweden after the Sweden Democrats, a political party founded by neo-Nazis, won the second most votes of any party in the 2022 Swedish elections. Their success represents a slide right from a nation that I had always understood to be a haven of progressivism. These elections are a warning to countries around the world about the potential for similar parties to gain power despite previously being seen as extreme due to their xenophobic rhetoric. I traveled to Sweden to better understand how this happened by observing the realities of Swedish society.

The Sweden Democrats campaigned on a familiar battle cry, a version of “keep Sweden Swedish,” referring to uncontrolled migration and rising crime rates, two forces working hand and hand to threaten the identity of the nation. These are the same themes we’ve heard repeatedly from the right in the United States and throughout Europe. Sweden in the last decade has had a liberal immigration policy and accepted many refugees seeking asylum. The Sweden Democrats had been anti-immigrant since the party’s inception, but with this influx of people they were somehow able to fan fears of cultural replacement and gain momentum by tapping into Swedes’ anxieties related to mass migration and violent crime.

It's true, Sweden has high rates of gun crime compared to much of Europe. The Sweden Democrats scored a major victory when this problem was explicitly tied to immigrant populations by their political opponents. Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson of the Social Democrats, on the left of Swedish politics and the party loved by many American liberals, said: “Too much migration and too weak integration has led to parallel societies where criminal gangs have been able to grow and gain a foothold.” It could now be treated as fact, an agreement from all sides of the political spectrum, that these “parallel societies” of migrants were to blame for crime, for the innocent bystanders hit by stray bullets, and for the public’s increased feelings of unease.

The left and the right of Swedish politics identify a problem related to crime in communities of largely immigrants, but they propose different solutions. The Sweden Democrats demand extreme limits, even a complete ban on immigration, while the Social Democrats argue for improved integration measures for immigrant communities, blaming disadvantaged conditions rather than the people themselves for these problems. Despite this difference in approach to the issue, the Social Democrats had unwittingly opened Pandora’s xenophobic box, and legitimized fears of a dangerous “other” in Swedish society.

I was curious about Sweden, but what finally pushed me to book a flight was an article that a friend sent to me from The European Conservative. The article is laughable in my opinion, and especially after the trip I made, as you’ll see. In it, an American visits Rosengård, an apparently notorious “no-go zone” known for high crime rates. It is one of the “parallel societies,” referenced by Andersson. The author finds the neighborhood to be horrifying because a teenager asks him for a lighter. That literally happens in the article, I am not being tongue-in-cheek. The article was obviously written by an individual that had decided this neighborhood was terrifying before ever setting foot there.

If you don’t believe me, let me show you my favorite way he betrays his point-of-view. When he arrives in Rosengård after dark he says “Two things are immediately striking about Rosengård at night. One is the eerie silence, and the other is the only sound that punctuates that silence—the cawing of seagulls.” So, peaceful with birds. He could have said quiet, but he had to include the “eerie,” just to frame the scene like a horror movie and reveal that he entered Rosengård already afraid of it. This narrative is representative of what has potentially happened in Swedish society. Political rhetoric has encouraged fear of these types of neighborhoods, leading to the preconceived understanding of danger embodied by this reporter. If people regard neighborhoods like Rosengård as condemned, there is no attempt at empathy, which encourages xenophobia. I thought I’d visit Rosengård and aim to understand its nuance. If I was to find a parallel society, in the way Andersson describes, then I would better understand why Sweden has turned right.

I flew to Copenhagen on a Wednesday night, taking the quick twenty-minute train ride to Malmö. I got up at seven on Thursday morning, took a bicycle provided by the hotel, and set out exploring with my notebook. Malmö center is quaint, a small city, old and cobblestoned, with a business district of modern glass and steel buildings. There was quite a rush of well-dressed people commuting to the business district that morning. I sent photos of the city to my mother who responded, “looks like Europe,” which I think nicely sums it up.

After breakfast I set out on the fifteen-minute bike ride to Rosengård from the city center, passed through an area of new construction, and before long I found myself surrounded by the unmistakable architecture of affordable housing. The buildings more closely resemble the estates of London than the projects of New York, with terraces adorning the sides of the buildings. If it wasn’t for the buildings being slightly run down, with the paneling a little slanted and the brick looking slightly worse for the wear, they wouldn’t look out of place in the American luxury apartment market. In fact, they don’t look too different from certain massive apartment buildings in TriBeCa that overcharge young professionals.

Despite the appearance of the buildings, the neighborhood was organized in a truly impressive way. Roads served as veins through the neighborhood, but between the buildings there was treelined bike paths, open lawns, playgrounds, and small football fields. It was clearly the absence of cars that created the “eerie silence.” In my eyes it was a triumph of urban planning, allowing there to be a safe space between apartment buildings for children to play without the risk of being run over, a quiet area for the residents to spend time in, a little oasis of nature in an urban environment. I had never seen anything like it. Rosengård, according to my research, was a bad area, but I found myself sitting at a stylishly designed picnic table watching a rabbit hop between trees. I’ve never seen a rabbit in any urban disadvantaged neighborhood in my life. Granted, I saw two rats that evening, but I think one rabbit for every two rats is a pretty good ratio.

That morning, as I rode down freshly paved bike paths between grassy hills, Sweden was feeling like the heaven I was groomed to expect it to be from all the liberal media I have consumed in my lifetime. I saw kids playing outside of schools in nice parks, running around in the grass, something I barely did in most of my schooling. In kindergarten and first grade my school quite literally had a fenced in concrete lot where we had recess. These kids had grass; I can’t get over all the grass. I saw playgrounds with ziplines, rope jungle gyms, and more small-sided football fields than I could count. There were two large public gardens where some people were planting stuff, and cleaning crews sweeping up the paths. One of the cleaning crews had a cart being pulled by a horse because there were no cars between the buildings. The quality of the neighborhood made me wonder about the construction I saw in-between the city center and Rosengård. If the new buildings were to be luxury apartments, I could easily see Rosengård being at risk for gentrification. The infrastructure was already nice enough to justify a rent increase. Perhaps that’s me looking through jaded American eyes, it’s sadly difficult for me to comprehend a nice place being affordable.

The lock the hotel provided for the bike was one of those flimsy cable ones with a number combination. Back home I have heard many stories of people having their bikes stolen and its common knowledge in my circle that if you own a bike, you shouldn’t take it outside if you don’t have a good solid U-Lock. I was slightly concerned to bring this bike to Rosengård because of how easy it would be to steal with the sub-par lock. To my surprise the many bikes locked between buildings in the neighborhood had locks at least as flimsy as mine, some even smaller and easier to break. The frequency with which different types of bike locks are used could be an interesting way to assess the risk of petty crime in a given city. Rosengård, according to this manner of assessment, is quite safe for your property compared to many cities in the U.S.

Of course, Rosengård is a troubled area. Things like grass, rabbits, football fields, and bike locks are all well and good, but they are also superficial if violence is prevalent in the community. I know that neighborhoods are different at night, so I resolved to spend the whole day in the neighborhood to see how it changes when darkness falls. This involved lying in the sun in the grass, finding a football and kicking it against a wall for a while, riding my bike to every square inch of the neighborhood, getting owned by a bunch of middle schoolers who were doing Fortnite dances and calling me Justin Bieber, and other misadventures.

Later in the evening, I noticed a group of men ranging from their teens to middle age playing small-sided football on one of the many pitches around Rosengård. They were yelling at each other in Arabic while several other young men, and a few children watched, leaning on the walls of the court. After watching them for a few minutes I asked one of the players in English if I could join. He responded fluently that the game was full and joked that he would try to injure someone so I could play. We shared a laugh, I felt welcome and decided to wait. Sure enough, before long one of the older men wanted to take a break and I slotted in. These men were great people to be around. I quickly learned that many of them were related in one way or another, and they teased each other constantly. They bellowed at each other, fouled each other deliberately, and kept a smile plastered to my face for the two or so hours I was playing.

More people showed up, the wives and girlfriends of the players, little kids who kept trying to climb onto the field, being constantly lifted back over the barrier by players, and more players who subbed on and off. This was like heaven to me. If I lived in Malmö, I would certainly schedule my days to make sure I was always able to attend these games. I noticed that on the side of one of the apartment buildings that towered over the field was a large picture of a smiling Zlatan Ibrahimovic. The Swedish football superstar, the child of a Bosnian father and a Croatian mother, who had grown up in Rosengård. An extreme example of the potential for greatness within the community.

Despite being the only person who didn’t speak Arabic, the only one with no connection to the place or the other players, everyone there was welcoming to me. Everyone spoke English and teased me like we had been friends for years. I felt like a part of a community in Rosengård despite being an obvious outsider. That is the power of sport on the one hand, but also a credit to these people. They were welcoming of outsiders, perhaps in the same way Sweden welcomed them when they were cultural outsiders. Sweden Democrats speak about immigrants failing to live up to Swedish values but if being kind to people regardless of their cultural background is a Swedish value, as represented in their immigration policy in the last decade or so, these men certainly embodied it.

As it got dark the match died down. I said goodbye to my new friends and hopped back on my bike, interested in how the character of the neighborhood had changed now that darkness had descended. I understood Rosengård to be a dangerous place after dark, but to my surprise there were still plenty of children outside. My father called me, so I hopped off my bike and sat down at a picnic table that inhabited a space between several buildings, next to yet another small-sided football field. There were several children playing in the area, and as I spoke to my father, I realized they were unsupervised. At one point I heard a voice shouting down in Swedish from one of the windows. A mother, I guessed, as one of the kids dutifully skipped into the building from which the mother yelled. The other children continued running around and playing unsupervised. This shocked me. Even in the nice communities I have had the pleasure of living in, the unsupervised play of children outside as it got dark was not a common occurrence, but here, where I assume the parents could see from their apartments, it was possible. It was such a wholesome sight and reminded me of the community atmosphere that certain politicians would claim that immigration had ruined. How many times have we heard something like: “when I was young, we played out on the street until dark!” I saw this utopian imagery persisting in Rosengård.

These kids weren’t exceptions. As I rode my bike around, I saw other groups of kids on different small-sided football pitches playing as the sky was turning from navy to black. Two girls who looked to be thirteen or so kept zooming past me, sharing an electric scooter, doing laps between the different apartment buildings. As I rode by the full-sized football pitches in one section of the neighborhood, another young girl walked by in cleats, apparently heading home alone from practice. Two young boys, who looked to be brothers, kicked a ball back and forth between each other as they also walked unaccompanied. These were things that I didn’t expect to see, just normal things, everyday things in a community that is sometimes referred to as a warzone.

The people I met in the neighborhood were extremely diverse. There were people from Somalia, Afghanistan, Jordan, Serbia, and Sweden. As I walked around that night, a teenage girl in a hijab passed me speaking on the phone in perfect English. English so perfect it was imperfect, slang heavy, she sounded like she could have gone to my high school. I badly wanted to find out what this apparent American teenager was doing walking alone at night in Rosengård, but I didn’t want to interrupt her phone call. Truly, Rosengård is a multiethnic community and in this way reminded me of London or New York where you may hear three or four languages being spoken on a subway or tube ride. I grew up in similarly diverse communities, and so it made me happy to spend the day amongst this variety of cultures.

Plenty of people were outside after dark, including groups of young men loitering outside of some shops. Young men are the demographic largely responsible for the crime, gang violence, and shooting. I closely observed these men, spending a couple hours chilling in the same area as them. The only notable things to report were amusing rather than concerning. The first occurred when I was taking laps around the neighborhood on my bike, checking in on the groups of young men with each pass. I was riding down the bike path and two teenagers dressed like they were straight out of Top Boy in Nike tracksuits rode straight towards me on electric scooters. One had a ski mask on and could have been mistaken for SL in this photo. As they approached me, I thought maybe I’d found the Rosengård that everyone is talking about, until the one in the ski mask held out his left arm to signal his turn. He had proper bike etiquette. I’ve never seen anyone signal their turn in a bike lane in the US who didn’t look like a Whole Foods mascot, so it was an amusing immediate reversal of my unjust suspicion.

The second interaction was with another young man in a tracksuit, cross-body bag, and electric scooter, the uniform for most of the gentlemen who spent their evening outside around Rosengård Centrum. I was walking towards him, he was leaning against his handlebars, chatting with his friend, taking up most of the space on a rather thin stretch of path. As I approached, he turned to look at me then scootched over, allowing me more space to pass. He gave me a friendly “hej” in that Swedish sing-song manner, as I went passed him in the dark. Both of these interactions are innocuous, fleeting, and surficial, I know, but as this demographic of young minorities in Rosengård are often villainized, made to be the objects of suspicion and fear in media and political discourse, I think it’s worthwhile including these two silly stories. The Sweden Democrats’ biggest fears, a perceived threat to Swedish values, acted nothing but friendly and polite towards me in a way that was representative of the Swedish culture I experienced everywhere in Malmö.

Again, I don’t mean to downplay the problems in the community with my narrative. Obviously just because I spent a nice couple of days in Rosengård does not mean it is a place without its significant problems. However, on my first day I failed to get any answers to my initial question of why Sweden turned right. If I had been alarmed or scared by what I saw in Rosengård I could understand how the rhetoric of the Sweden Democrats had resonance in Swedish society, but this is not what I found. My second day, I aimed to have conversations with residents about that very question.

There is a falafel truck tucked under a footbridge that leads to Rosengård Centrum where I had several revealing conversations along these lines. I will leave out the names of the people I spoke with and will paraphrase my conversations based off the notes I took. Recording was not something I wanted to do. We had friendly conversations; I conducted no formal interviews. The first conversation was with the smiling middle-aged man working in the truck who spoke excellent English. We started to speak as I stood waiting for my shawarma. He was an immigrant from Lebanon who arrived in Malmö when he was a child. Rosengård was his home, he told me, as he lived in the neighborhood for the last thirty years. It was his father who had opened this truck in 1989, one of the first falafel places in Malmö, he claimed. After first selling falafel to local restaurants, the man’s father saw the potential and started a business out of that very truck. The business grew, now operating in four locations throughout the city. He told me he had studied to be an engineer but decided to return to the family business, wanting to work alongside his brothers.

Since he had lived in the neighborhood so long, I asked him if it was as bad as made to seem in the media I had consumed. He told me he loves Rosengård and that it’s a place with a genuine community. Just recently he had moved away, further outside the city, and said he missed Rosengård tremendously. His new neighbors, he complained, ignored him, and stuck to themselves whereas in Rosengård he knew everyone and always had people to talk to. He had watched his neighbors’ kids grow up and loved that aspect of the place. “Community,” he told me, “Rosengard is a place that has community.” His children had all been raised in the neighborhood, and now his grandchildren are attending the same schools that his children went to.

I asked him about crime, wondering if it is as bad as it is made to sound. There is crime, he told me, it is a problem. I asked, why is there crime, what do you think is the root cause? The guns, he told me firmly. He argued that guns are the cause of the violence, not just the tools. The solution to the problem, he said, is a stronger police presence. The police aren’t paid enough, he argued, they don’t make a real effort, so the kids don’t respect them. The guns come from Denmark; he told me. The police need to stop every car on the Øresund bridge, which connects Malmö and Copenhagen, as well as search people around the neighborhood to make sure that the guns stay off the streets. I nodded along, thinking to myself that this plan sounded a bit too much like stop-and-frisk to me, a potential path towards some racist police practices. He hastened to add, that I probably won’t see crime while in Rosengård. Most of the time, the neighborhood is safe, he said. The criminals are a small portion of the population, and I won’t see the effects of their practices as a normal civilian. I asked him about the prospects of the youth in Rosengård, could a kid growing up here pursue any career they dream of? Yes, he said definitively, this is possible in Rosengård.

This man loved his community, as he should. It was the place out of which his family built a successful business. He had experienced social mobility and was able to move to a “nice” neighborhood, even though he seemed to prefer Rosengård. It was the place he had raised his kids, where his kids are raising their kids. He struck me as a happy man, his smile was the genuine sort, and it was clear that this place, despite its flaws, made him who he is today.

Shortly after he gave me my shawarma, which was amazing, as I stood eating it by the truck, another man walked up. Confidently the newcomer loudly yelled to the man in the truck, “Habibi, assalamu alaykum!” The man in the truck spun around with a big smile on his face and said “wa alaykum as-salam.” Turning to me, he said “See!” like he was proving a point, “this is Rosengård. This man is Serbian, and he speaks with me is Arabic. This is Rosengård!” He told me they had known each other for a long time. I learned that the Serbian man, another lifelong Rosengård resident, has been coming here since the shop first opened when he was only thirteen. He ordered his food and the two chatted away in Swedish.

The man in the truck, as he started preparing the food, switched back to English and described my interest in Rosengård to the Serbian man. The newcomer took me in. He had dark brown short hair, very blue eyes, and was dressed in a work uniform for a company I didn’t recognize. The car he pulled up in was monogramed with the same logo. I asked this man the same question I had asked his friend, what’s the deal with crime in Rosengård? Like the man in the truck, he reiterated that it’s true, there is crime in the neighborhood, though he reaffirmed that I would not see it. The media blows it out of proportion, he asserted, how often they talk about it makes it seem like people are constantly shooting when obviously they are not. It’s true this is how the neighborhood is made to seem, I was an example of this effect. I was pleasantly surprised that children were allowed to play outside, so clearly, I thought this place was far crazier than it really is.

I asked him what he thinks the problem arises from. Here, he provided a different answer than his friend, and told me the problem is the lack of opportunity that many of the more recent immigrants face. With that, he launched into the story of his parents’ immigration. They immigrated from former Yugoslavia during the war and had great opportunities upon arrival, he said. In Sweden, they were able to find decent work right away, were enrolled in language classes, and were set up to build a happy life in their new country. He was born in Sweden and grew up in Malmö. I got the sense that he, like his friend in the falafel truck, were examples of successful immigration, examples of people who benefited from growing in Rosengård, and who went on to positively contribute to Sweden itself. When he was growing up, he faced some exclusion and discrimination because of his Serbian ancestry, he told me. He claimed that the newer immigrants face discrimination even worse than he did, compounded with racism. The man in the kebab truck piped up and said he suspects some of his new neighbors don’t speak to him because they are racist. On top of that discrimination, the Serbian man continued, the opportunities to work are not the same as when his parents arrived. “Of course, they do crime, they can’t work!” I remember him proclaiming, throwing his hands over his head.

Finishing my shawarma, I said goodbye to my new friends, both of whom said they hoped I would enjoy Rosengård. It’s really a great place they assured me again as I got back on my bike. These conversations didn’t necessarily answer my guiding questions, but their input on potential solutions to the neighborhood problems struck me as insightful and interesting. Increase the likelihood of getting caught through a stronger police presence and decrease the need to commit crime in the first place through providing more work opportunities. I was also left feeling amused because these men represented a relationship that is made to seem impossible by some political movements. Factions in the Serbian government argue that refugees from the Middle East should not be allowed into the country, because of cultural incompatibility and the need to protect Serbian culture. Here in Rosengård these two men, old friends, treated each other’s cultures with respect, maintaining their individual cultures while gaining an understanding and appreciation for the other’s. A trip to a multicultural place always makes that type of rhetoric seem absurd. Multicultural surroundings don’t equate the erasure of cultures; this is obvious in Rosengård.

I’ve commonly heard from people who are fundamentally anti-immigration that due to mass migration, certain European cities have become “unrecognizable.” Granted, this was my first time in Malmö but I have a hard time understanding how it could have become unrecognizable. They haven’t bulldozed the historic buildings of the downtown, nor have they turned every charming café into a McDonalds. An influx of immigration does not inherently change a city, it diversifies it, adds another dimension to it, but there is no erasure as far as I could see. The Swedish were still Swedish, there was now just more varieties of Swedish people. The Serbian and Lebanese men, old friends, spoke to each other in Swedish, they have expanded what it means to be Swedish, and I would think Swedes should be proud of that.

When politicians or members of the media talk about Rosengård like it is the wild west, I have to conclude that they must either be agoraphobic, racists, or have simply never been there. The majority of what you’ll see in Rosengård is nice, even pleasant or heartwarming in my experience. Without a doubt, the neighborhood, and neighborhoods like it have their problems that need to be sorted out. To single-mindedly scapegoat immigration will do nothing to solve these existing problems. If you come to the community, you will learn that everyone wants the same things, to create the same outcomes, so collaboration within these communities to get to the bottom of the issues and construct practical policy to fix these problems may be a better approach than just blaming people who need help. Get to know some of the people in Rosengård, and learn what the neighborhood represents, and you’ll learn, as I did, that the community works to disprove the political thesis of the Sweden Democrats. Successful immigration is possible, even plausible for many of the people in Rosengård and communities like it. Certain politicians let the minority overshadow the majority of immigrants who do great things for Sweden. My time in Rosengård was anti-climactic in a sense. Nothing crazy happened to make headlines for this article. It was a climactic anti-climax, I think, the realization that this is a normal and even a nice place. That is something that I would think the Sweden Democrats have a vested interest in hiding from the majority of Swedish society.