For my final post on Malmö, I want to share a photo essay from my brief visit. This is a city I hope to return to and take my family along.
Malmö Photo Essay
Malmö made headlines for its “crime wave” during the pandemic, mostly involving rival gangs. That said, the city is incredibly safe and far safer than most major US cities statistically. Even in the “most dangerous” Scandianivcan city, you’re still quite safe.
In addition to an efficient rail system that took us swiftly across “The Sound” (Øresund in Danish or Öresund in Swedish), we used scooters to get around town. It was first time ever using one and I loved them – how easy to hop on and hop off. While these may not be practical in Los Angeles, they were very efficient here (and a day pass from Voi cost only about 79 crowns or about 8USD).
The city is also very walkable, with a beautiful town square. There’s no trash on the ground and every building was whll-mantined. No graffiti or homeless people either.
I shared about the great coffee I enjoyed, but one of my favorite activities was going to MAXI Stormarknad (hypermarket). I love to go grocery shopping in foreign lands and this was a great cultural experience (with my friend, who is Swedish, pointing out many local and Swedish specialties).
While I did not buy anything, we also stopped at Systembolaget, the state-run liquor chain store in Sweden. The selection was amazing…there was even Blanton’s Bourbon from Kentucky (my personal favorite).
We took the scooter over to the Ribersborgs Kallbadhus (Kallis), which was closed for the season, but is a bathhouse that was first opened in 1898 and includes:
- five saunas
- two sea water pools
- two wood-fired hot tubs
- a sun deck
I hope to return next time to this.
The Turning Torso building is the iconic neo-futurist residential skyscraper built in 2005. It was the tallest building in the Nordic region until 2022 when the Karlatornet in Gothenburg surpassed it.
CONCLUSION
I enjoyed my time in Malmö and view it as a very livable city. I realize that Sweden lives under the NATO defense umbrella without having to cough up sizable amounts of its GDP toward defense spending, but I really think this city and country gets it priorities right in so many ways. Excellent healthcare, good transport, superb education, and a more egalitarian society is something that I appreciate.
Sweden is terrific, super terrific…..but the weather…..
Yeah definitely a place to visit during the summer.
I’ve heard bad things about Malmo but that’s just it: I don’t live there. I notice that the streets were empty when Matt took his photos which may be due to the weather because a city isn’t normal that looks so empty. Off season is a wonderful time to visit and that’s usually my preferred time to go.
He was in Malmo when the city’s schools were closed for the fall break week and offices had one of their lowest traffic period weeks of the year.
Malmo does have various problems and has long been a very segregated place going back at least a hundred years. But those more serious problems, including safety ones, tend to be concentrated in areas tourists don’t typically visit or are even almost predictably event related and pale in comparison with the safety levels in US cities of comparable or larger size.
A lot of people due to political ideology don’t want to acknowledge it, but Malmo is actually a much nicer and more interesting place to visit now as a tourist than it was 20-40 years ago. Also, its crime issues seem to have actually been declining relative to other parts of Sweden and Scandinavia.
People love to hate Malmo — and that includes many Swedes who seem to want Skane without cities and yet whose dream vacation is to go to NYC, LA or Miami. Malmo can’t be all that bad. Across comparably and larger sized cities in high income countries, it has been one of the best places in the last ten years to make money on residential property and related land investments.
Great post. I visited Malmo on a day trip from Copenhagen in May, and saw many of the sites in your photos. I found Malmo to be quite pleasant. Looking forward to returning to Sweden in the spring.
country with priorities straight?
they do nothing to help the world like fighting terrorist or combating russia or china
they sit peacefully while the rest of the world works for them
lazy bums
1.3% of GDP in Sweden vs. 3.5% in USA. Essentials are covered but without the fancy weapons systems and hardware that only enrich defense contractors…
They have long been one of our key European intelligence and security partners in the shadow. And they have been more reliable in that regard than many NATO countries (of which it still is not one).
I have long said that Sweden is an American lap dog. It’s because I sort of get what we have been able to get done in the area for decades, with Swedish authorities even willfully breaking Swedish laws on behalf of the USG and more or less not making an issue of anything that would have made the Germans, the French and even the Brits to explode publicly at us in their own ways. It’s as if they want to try to be on good terms with big brother so they can spend more time doing big brother things. 😉
Sweden has quite an arms export industry, and they seem pretty cooperative with US DOD and with working with USG concerns when it comes to weapons systems exports. They have engaged in being part of US-led security actions in Central and West Asia and even in North/West Africa They have long been one of our key European intelligence and security partners in the shadow. And they have been more reliable in that regard than many NATO countries (of which it still is not one).
I have long said that Sweden is an American lap dog. It’s because I sort of know what we have been able to get done in the area for decades, with Swedish authorities willfully breaking Swedish laws on behalf of the USG and more or less not making an issue of anything that would have made the Germans, the French and even the Brits to explode publicly at us in their own ways.
Sweden has quite an arms export industry, and they seem pretty cooperative with US DOD and with working with USG concerns when it comes to weapons systems exports. They have also engaged in US-led military deployments in and around select parts of Asia and Africa. They aren’t bad as a lap dog, but they are sort of peripheral for various reasons.
Sweden has long been paranoid about Russia, and it had started pulling back from China ties in ways even before it became so popular in the US to want to cut back on China.
Even well after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Swedish military still had its perennial, centuries old “enemy in the east” as its training target. Having a big, bloated defense capability of its own to placate weapons manufacturers isn’t really a Swedish priority or even capability. Sweden is basically Minnesota and Wisconsin combined when it comes to population. How much of a military can MN+WI+IA really support? And due to Swedish approaches to budgeting, running up huge debts for military capability is going to take a back seat unless and until they even decide to get back to comprehensive national service for most all Swedes (or even most all Swedish males).
Sounds like they have it made. Brilliant scheme.
Speaking of crime in the area, around 30 years ago I was in Copenhagen for a family wedding and a female cousin said that for a while solo females had to be careful walking around downtown after 1 A.M. because there was a rapist. As in one. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather.
One of the most beautiful buildings in Malmo is the synagogue.
I am not so sure about the “excellent healthcare” and “superb education”.
The healthcare system is affordable for its users and generally accessible, but it has a lot of foot-dragging elements when it comes to dealing with persistent health issues with longer term health consequences that don’t fit into a more common ailment box. If I have a serious health issue, I would rather get the diagnosis and treatment in the US.
I find the education system in Sweden to be weighed down by a few factors, including the tendency to slow down the whole class for the slowest people in the class during the years when kids are most absorptive of knowledge. And then they sort of “specialize” too much at later points. They also have a tendency to want to shut up kids — more so boys — who are willing to speak up and discuss more than other kids in class. And then there is the layer of sexism and even racism in how that plays out in class and with school administrators. And yet discipline levels in class at compulsory schooling levels in Sweden is poor and there end up being a lot of distractions anyway. Delivered Danish school standards tend to be higher than Swedish ones. Maybe it’s because Denmark tend to be more open in what the challenges are while Sweden tended to be less open and more passive-aggressive when it comes to the same kind of challenges.
@Matthew.
Sweden is NOT part of NATO. That’s precisely the problem at present within NATO. Much like Finnland, Sweden maintains a sizeable and capable military well suited to defend itself and has long sought to maintain its military independence, cooperating with NATO and the US but always maintaining its own responsibility for its defense and not entering into military alliances. While there’s been talk of Sweden joining NATO, Swedens NATO bid came truly to the fore only after Putin invaded Ukraine – a process since stalled by Turkey and Hungary.
So to imply that Sweden can have nice things because the US is paying indirectly for them through NATO is incorrect.
I didn’t say Sweden is in NATO nor did I say that the US is propping up Sweden or anything of the sort. I’m well aware of Turkey putting the brakes on Sweden’s NATO accession. But I absolutely insist that Sweden is not a nuclear power nor pursues the sort of military hardware that some of its allies do because it feels confident that others have its back. That’s quite a different thing than saying Sweden is nice because the US pays for it. That’s not what I said at all.
Sweden has signed some additional security-related bilaterals with the US this year. They are basically a NATO partner even without being in NATO, as we now even have access rights to most of their wanted base infrastructure/depots. It’s really EU-member Hungary that is really slow-going Sweden’s NATO application and making things easier for Erdogan to continue to play games and milk the situation still. Turkey is “slow-going” it to the extent that Erdogan has now let it be a “parliamentary” issue in Turkey. It wouldn’t be the first time a country uses its democratic processes and legislative body as an excuse for the national head of government to say he/she wants to do one thing but has “democratic/domestic constraints”. It’s Hungary that really is the big stall for Sweden’s NATO application.
Not having a bloated military, not being favorably disposed to too much far-flung military adventurism, and no long-standing massive foreign military aid expenditures does have consequences on what the Swedish government delivers to its public without huge government budget deficits and the related piling up of huge amounts of national debt by the government.
Of course I can’t but think that a lot of the refugees and asylum-seekersSweden has gotten are in some ways a product of US geo-strategic pursuits, and so Sweden is sort of paying in that regard.
Since you mentioned visiting with your kids, you should plan to check out the variety of outdoor public playgrounds around Malmo that are very unique and different from each other. It will require getting around by bus or maybe even car, but the mix of special playgrounds in Malmo is rather amazing for young kids. I have been amazed at how many public playgrounds there are in Malmo and at the thought put into them. As someone who was a young kid in NYC and use to playing in the parks, I ended up very impressed by what Malmo offers its young kids in terms of playgrounds. Also, housing development permission in Malmo requires even private housing associations to have playground plans, and their playgrounds too are publicly accessible.
They’ve done a great job for young kids in that regard.
It sounds like Turkey is ready to ease off the brakes with the whole NATO thing. Also, the thought of there being “crime” in Malmö is laughable. In the last 10 days people have run in to shopping malls in Austin and Ocala and gunned random people down for no reason. Crime is relative.
A couple of years ago the biggest shopping mall in Malmo had some shooting. One gangster had some little gangster go trail a rival gangster during court hearings and then the guy on.trial was gunned down at the mall and some unaffiliated woman got shot too. Even the Swedish PM had freaked out about that; but I was then still thinking what a lucky country that the national head of government freaks out about such violence. In the US, it’s all “thoughts and prayers” when even worse happens and the idea of the President freaking out over two or three people shot at a mall is no longer expected given how often we have mass shootings and other gun violence. Most of the gun violence in Sweden is gang-related and/or drugs-related and it tends to be targeted and localized. Can’t say the same thing about the US.
We do have a higher rate of violence but we also have a much, much, much larger population from which violence can occur. Regardless, it’s unfortunate that there’s so much friction in our society. On the plus side, violent crime in America remains -very- low compared to thirty years ago.
Rates of violence are to be measured in per capita terms. And when it comes to rates of deadly violence, Sweden is still a much safer place than the US because the country doesn’t have the gun culture we have in the US and also because even the poorer sections of Sweden tend to have less grounds to be as extremely despondent over day to day matters than is the case in the US. There are also other things that make Sweden a safer country. But as the Swedish government increasingly takes its cues from the US in how to do things domestically in the country, I expect Sweden will increasingly have the kind of problems the US has.
While the rates of crime in the US improved as a result of things done during the Clinton Admin and thereafter, it seems like we have more mass shootings per capita across the US nowdays than compared to 30 years ago.