Sweden’s multi-age, inter-faith, non-binary apartment building

THE first thing Torbjörn Björk does on being introduced is apologise that the vast majority of Rosana Simson’s new neighbours will be close to 60 years older than her.

“I know we don’t look so old now,” the retired airline pilot booms as he greets her in the foyer. “But we won’t be that way for long.!”

The 70-year-old and his wife, Britta, are the latest residents at the new Sällbo apartment building in Helsingborg, Sweden.

The building is an experiment in intergenerational living, with 31 flats for retired people side-by-side with 20 flats for 18 to 25-year-olds, of which 10 are reserved for recent immigrants. Residents are required to socialise with each other for at least two hours every week.

Ms Simson, a shy, petite 20-year-old, together with her husband and two-yearold son Dante, will be the only young family.

“I love hanging out with elderly people,” she said. “They’re usually really talkative and they like telling you about how it was when they were young. I think that’s so sweet.”

The scheme has been designed by Dragana Curovic, who arrived in Sweden from Yugoslavia when she was 20, and who is now in charge of social living and integration for Helsingborg council.

“It’s not only the first in Sweden,” she claims. “Our constellation is unique anywhere in the world.”

Well over half of the households in Sweden comprise just one person, more than in any other country in the world. One person in eight reports having no close friends. “The social part was very important for me, that we live together and make cakes together and so on,” said Mr Björk. “We tend to isolate each other nowadays and we need to break that.”

Each resident was selected via a questionnaire and an hour-long interview.

Starting in late November, they have been moving in at a rate of two apartments a day. The apartments are small, but there is a lot of shared space, with two sitting rooms on each floor converted into art, board games, computer and yoga rooms, a library, a gym and kitchens for pickling, baking and growing herbs.

Anki Andersson, 70, has moved in with her husband, Kalle, 85. She said: “We don’t want to live only with other older people. I don’t know who will go first, but one of us will die. So when that happens we wanted to make sure the other has company.”

Ms Curovic has handpicked the residents to make sure they are as different from one another as possible: there is a gay couple; there are two residents with non-binary gender identities; there are Muslims and Christians. But she bristles at the suggestion that this amounts to social engineering: “We are not creating a new society. We are compressing everything that already exists in society into one apartment building.”

After two years, if the council housing company decides not to extend the project, it will convert the building into an assisted living facility, replacing young people with other pensioners. But the residents say that will not happen.

“It’s a new thing that we haven’t had in Sweden before,” Mr Björk said. “But I think there will be many more like this coming.”