14 aug The Malmö-Lund urban development brings to mind New York in 1898
Malmö and Lund are growing together into one city – an international business and research center. Residents from 186 countries, world-leading materials research and ten direct destinations to North America are lifting the city to a higher level. The scale is smaller, but the similarities with the formation of New York City in 1898 are there.
When Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens were consolidated into New York City in 1898, the world’s second largest city after London, it was a unique event. The population had increased sharply for decades – as the Europeans’ gateway to land, dreams and freedom – to 3.4 million inhabitants, the Brooklyn Bridge had opened in 1883 and plans for a metro system that would connect the city were in full swing. The oldest part of the metro had opened in 1885, an agreement for a larger system was concluded in 1894 and in 1904 the first new line opened.
The scale is different, but when Malmö and Lund, together with the three smaller municipalities of Burlöv, Lomma and Staffanstorp, grow together functionally into one city and a creative business and research center, there are parallels. The population has increased by 37 percent in the 21st century to 570,000 inhabitants in the city center (in terms of area smaller than the municipality of Gothenburg, Sweden’s second largest city) and around 4 million inhabitants including the immediate surrounding areas in Skåne and on Danish Zealand within an hour’s distance.
The expansion of the infrastructure also plays a crucial role. The railway has experienced a renaissance and has been expanded to four tracks between Malmö and Lund, with the City Tunnel through Malmö, the Lommabanan, the Trelleborgsbanan and the reopening of the Continental Line. New train stations have been added. The Öresund Link, which opened in 2000, connects the city with Copenhagen Airport, just 12 minutes away, and provides Malmö-Lund with direct flights to the ten North American cities of Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Montreal, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Toronto and Washington. Every year, 3.5 million Swedes travel from the airport. In addition, the construction of the Fehmarn Belt Link, which is planned to open around 2030, is underway, which will shorten the travel time between Malmö-Lund and Hamburg in Germany to three hours and create the conditions for symbiosis with Europe’s largest economy.
The increased population and infrastructure investments have contributed to the integration of the labor and housing markets in the five municipalities. Residents and businesses now feel that they operate in a larger urban area. It has not gone so far that there is talk of merging the municipalities into one municipality – as happened with New York’s five boroughs after local referendums were held. Intelligence Watch, Skåne’s leading think tank, has instead proposed a softer form of political integration: that the municipalities remain, but that the ongoing city formation is manifested with a city charter to cooperate in well-defined key areas.
The political process is slow and can be assumed to last for a long time. However, other political processes promote the city’s development. These include Sweden’s EU membership in 1995 and NATO membership in 2024, which make the city Sweden’s most centrally located in relation to trading partners and allies in the EU, the UK, the US and Canada. The location also strongly contributed to the Eurovision Song Contest – the world’s largest live music competition – being hosted in Malmö twice, as well as the Men’s Handball World Championship and the European Table Tennis Championship in 2023 and the Floorball World Championship in 2024.
Malmö-Lund’s new central location makes the city more attractive and gives it the opportunity to develop into an international node in Scandinavia, not least since Sweden is by far the largest market in the Nordic region. Many international companies prefer to establish themselves in Malmö-Lund over the Danish capital Copenhagen, as the Swedish market is almost twice as large as the Danish one. This is something Malmö-Lund has noticed. The Japan Business & Innovation Hub is an example of how Malmö-Lund, backed by the association Japan Bridge Scandinavia, is taking the initiative to become a node for business exchange with Japan, where companies such as Canon (which acquired Axis), Sony and Fanuc stand out with a large presence in Malmö-Lund and Tetra Pak, Alfa Laval and Ikea export in the other direction.
Equally important for the city is the level of knowledge. Lund University is normally ranked among the world’s top 100 and Malmö University College became a university in 2018. The university environments have contributed to a rare well-educated population. A full 3.0 percent of the population has a postgraduate education, which can be compared with 2.2 percent in the municipalities of Stockholm and Gothenburg and the Swedish national average of 1.4 percent.
Something that will pay off in the coming decades is the investment in the two particle and materials research facilities, the European Spallation Source (ESS) and MAX IV in Lund. They constitute the two largest research investments in Sweden ever (an estimated 50 billion kronor in today’s money) and attract some of the world’s leading minds in particle physics. The fact that Professor Anne L’Huillier at Lund University received the Nobel Prize in Physics may be a sign of things to come. It was also no coincidence that French President Emmanuel Macron visited the ESS, which is partly financed with French money, during his state visit to Sweden in 2024.
Finally, Malmö, like New York, is an international port city that has historically stood for openness and immigration: in the medieval Danish city, it was Germans and Dutch, in 1943-1945 Jews, in 1992 refugees from the former Yugoslavia and in recent decades refugees and relatives from the Middle East have arrived. New York’s media companies are the equivalent in Malmö of creative computer game companies. Neither city is a capital, but rather a commercial, creative hub in the global economy where business and culture have higher priority than political power play. As one immigrant business leader put it: ”Here I realize The Swedish Dream”.
Anders Olshov
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