A recreated city

Rejuvenation is possible with political will and if the importance of design in the digital economy is embraced

On the dock of the harbour of Malmö in Sweden, you’ll find a packed restaurant that serves one dish a day but has a queue that goes out of the doors.

Saltimporten Canteen — a trendy bistro serving flavoursome food made with local ingredients — sits in a refurbished building amid grain silos and buildings with peeling paint left behind from the era of the long-departed shipping industry.

If you take a walk outside Saltimporten, you’ll find the offices of architects, small design businesses and furniture stores, while the car park in front of it is packed with vehicles and bicycles, some of which have brought people here just for the two hours a day that the bistro is open for lunch.

In a way Saltimporten and the little strip of design-centric offices represent the rejuvenation of Malmö, a small European city on the western edge of Sweden across the strait from Copenhagen.

It was once an epicentre for ship building, but after this industry declined, Malmö found a way to reinvent itself. And it has, with aplomb.

“Malmö [is home to] 50% first- and second-generation immigrants from 178 countries around the world. It’s the thirdor fourth-most international city,” says Magnus Thure Nilsson, the CEO of Media Evolution, an organisation that has helped turn Malmö into a Scandinavian digital design hub. Inside a converted warehouse, Media Evolution’s offices have 100 people working in them.

Malmö is also home to the biggest computer game company in Sweden, and hosts Scandinavia’s largest computer games event, says Nilsson.

“It’s a rising creative industry hub in Sweden.

“The municipalities are helpful and supportive; and we’ve got an incubator programme run by Malmö,” he says.

The city runs a project called Little Big Malmö to convince people to emigrate to it. Half of its 300,000 population is under the age of 29.

Malmö — which seems to have effected its shift from the old analogue to the new digital economies successfully — can be a model for other cities that aspire to rejuvenate themselves and also want to embrace the