Explaining Rinkeby

Before we get all hyped up on Sweden and recent riot talk, with a wide array of commentary.....let's establish some facts.

1.  This recent riot episode started not in Malmo.....but in a suburb of Stockholm.....Rinkeby.  It's about five kilometers northwest of the city of Stockholm...and mostly considered a suburb. It's safe to say that it's on the far end of city.....and it was planned that way.

2.  This riot?  It started Monday evening (8PM) around the local cop station.  The charge?  Illicit drug sales of some type.  However, what happened over the next four hours at the suburb involved car-burning and public damage.  It would appear that the cops mostly just stood back, and did a minimum amount of action against the youths involved in the act.  One cop was noted firing a warning shot.  For personal injury....other than one reporter that was roughed up and his camera stolen.....no one can report anyone injured (oddly, with all the action going on).  Total cars burned?  Six (at least the locals report that).  Drug gang situation?  I can only guess that's the connection.

3.  Rinkeby?  Well....there's a story to the area.  Size-wise....I'd say it's no more than 50 acres.  It's around forty apartment buildings.

The history?  It's far from the waterfront, the old medieval part of town, and away from tourists.  It was designed that way in the mid-1960s.

Around 1975/76.....they completed the project. Let's be very honest....in 1965, this was supposed to fix up a major housing shortage that existed in Stockholm.  Presently, around 16,000 to 18,000 people live there.

It was supposed to be built to be affordable housing for the MIDDLE class.  Please note....that was the 1965 idea.

On the planning side....they built it with bike paths, plenty of parking, and green space surrounding the whole thing.  But here's the curious thing....it was built as a dense structure.  Oddly, by the time that they completed the project.....the economy had slowed down and the urgent need for the housing seemed to diminish.  Yeah, that's generally the problem with government planning.

Over roughly a twenty-year period after wrapping up this project.....Stockholm lost 20-percent of it's population.  They built something that the middle class really didn't need.  By the 1990s....immigration was starting to occur in higher numbers.

Wanna take a guess where they pushed the migrants and immigrants?  Rinkeby.

Yeah....it made sense.  Empty apartments....all in a dense location.  Perfect ghetto design.

Lots of different migrants.....all regions of Africa, southern Europe (Albania, Serbia, etc), Middle East, etc.  Muslim.  Non-Muslims.

Public housing....dense design....cheap look.  It was a perfect ghetto.

Wild kids?  Yeah.  Accepted poor behavior in this entire neighborhood?  Yeah.

No one from the city does unemployment statistics for this one single neighborhood.  It would be curious to know the rate but then it'd draw the social workers into a difficult position....you can't really fix this unless you threw everyone out of this ghetto operation and forced them to live in normal neighborhoods and start to act more "Swedish".

Rinkeby was planned out over fifty years ago, and it's design is what creates a lot of these problems of today.  Urbanization, ghetto life, and youths with no maturity.