Sweden’s third largest city is located in the lively Öresund region. Malmö has more than 300,000 inhabitants, and the region, including Copenhagen, is home to some 3.6 million people, making it the most densely populated area in Scandinavia. Formerly an industrial city of factory workers, Malmö today hosts less manufacturing and more research and development, retail and private services. With a political leadership that has been focusing ambitiously on sustainable development for some decades now, the City of Malmö is internationally renowned for its green profile. The city knows the benefits of first-mover advantage on, for example, green technology and holistic urban development.
.jpg "Source: Malmö City")
A bumpy childhood
With a history dominated for centuries by manufacturing and heavy industry, Malmö went through a number of major crises during the economic rollercoaster ride of the 20th century. However, the many sharp turns may have endowed the city with a flexible mindset and a certain fearlessness for trying new innovations. Malmö’s green development took off strongly with the construction of the new environmentally smart city district Western Harbour, initiated for the European Housing Expo Bo01 in 2001. Malmö thereby stepped onto the Swedish sustainability stage with determination – and it has remained on the frontline since. The city has invested in several large sustainability projects such as the solar park in Sege Park and the transitioning of the neighbourhood Augustenborg. However, there are also countless smaller initiatives that add up to a large total. Much of the success can be attributed to ambitious and bold politicians, and to the continuous dialogue with and inclusion of the residents in the various neighbourhoods.
Circular clouds and growing mussels (case study)
Two interesting initiatives can be noted as examples of the City of Malmö’s bold, curious and open-minded attitude. One is the city’s public–private co-operation with the company off2off, which offers a cloud-based communication tool to identify unused furniture and inventories at different public workplaces, matching them with demands from other workplaces, and redistributing the items for continued use. Over the course of one year of this circular business project, the City of Malmö saved the annual equivalent of 15 teachers’ salaries, the CO2 emissions from 60 cars and the electricity consumption of 57 electrically heated villas. The project is now scaling up and can be easily replicated in other municipalities, regions and countries. The other initiative concerns reducing eutrophication in the Öresund strait, for which the City of Malmö is growing mussels to support the ecosystem services the mussels provide. The mussels live off nutrients in the water, and when harvested they can be used as feed for livestock or to produce biogas in Sweden’s only biogas plant specially designed for marine biomass, located in Trelleborg.
Leading by diversity
In support of its extensive and varied efforts for sustainable urban development, the City of Malmö has taken part in or led the development of several management tools and policies. For example, Malmö co-operated with WWF Sweden in 2010–2012, which resulted in an improved cleantech strategy to develop the city as a trial location for globally interesting environmental innovations. The city also collaborated in the improvement of the tool REAP, developed by the Stockholm Environment Institute to retrieve data on ecological and carbon footprints at local level. The City of Malmö has also established the Institute for Sustainable Urban Development in collaboration with Malmö University as a hub for knowledge and experience exchange on urban redevelopment processes. Significant for the city’s sustainability work is also the strong emphasis on social sustainability to stem its increasing social gaps and health inequality. The city appointed a commission to investigate how to address these issues, resulting in two overarching recommendations that the City Executive Board has endorsed: establishing a social investment policy that can reduce inequities, and changing processes by creating knowledge alliances and democratised governance.
.jpg "Source: Malmö City")
Regional dimension
The case of Malmö demonstrates the benefits of a fresh perspective when considering the environmental sustainability and liveability challenges faced by cities today. Instead of viewing the environmentally sustainable city as an overwhelming endeavour accompanied by large investment needs, the City of Malmö’s leadership saw an opportunity to create a better place to live. Malmö’s green transition started with the rejuvenation of the old industrial city and, as a consequence, sustainable urban development has advanced in Malmö during the last two decades. This is largely due to the long-term strategic work undertaken by the City of Malmö, which began in the 1990s as a response to the economic restructuring process necessitated by the decline of industrial production and engineering in Malmö. Today, Malmö has long-term strategies and policies in place to create a greener city with a particularly strong hub of cleantech companies. It is a solid example of a city that fruitfully combined efforts to reduce carbon emissions with a focus on improving the liveability for their citizens.
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