The large purple puma is the point of interest of Umeå. The world’s first publicly commissioned statue devoted to the #MeToo motion depicts a snarling cat atop a metal body designed to mimic jail bars. Its official title, in keeping with its artist creator Camilla Akraka, is Hear however everybody simply calls it “puman” – the Puma. Because it appeared in the primary sq. in entrance of the previous metropolis corridor in 2019, it has develop into the crowning image for this quiet, unassuming place just a few hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle, recognized to some as “essentially the most feminist metropolis on the earth”.
Umeå (pronounced oo-may-yoh, inhabitants 134,000) is legendary in Sweden as the house of radical concepts and of “the purple college” – throughout the 70s, the town hosted numerous pupil strikes and left-wing, politically lively college students. A Swedish buddy tells me that “everybody in Umeå is closely into punk”. This appears to be a form of code to imply that Umeå is considered – and thinks of itself – as primarily “cool”. Even the web site of Go to Umeå, the native vacationer board, claims that the town has “the beardiest and most closely tattooed inhabitants on the earth”. Boringly, this doesn’t confer with the ladies.
So what makes Umeå such an awesome place to be a girl? To search out out, I spend a day shadowing Annika Dalén and Linda Gustafsson, the town council’s gender equality officers. It might be onerous to seek out anybody on Earth who’s extra enthusiastic concerning the thrilling world of “gender consciousness within the city atmosphere” than these two.
An on the spot instance, near the puma, down in the direction of the river, is a swinging seat the place I really feel unusually comfy. Why? The seat was commissioned as a part of a particular challenge that canvassed the views of teenage ladies, and is designed with common feminine peak in thoughts: 165cm, my peak. I’m not about to demand that each piece of municipal furnishings on the earth be created to my exact specs. However it’s good to expertise it for as soon as.
“When the college was based right here [in 1965], it was a time of progressive concepts in Sweden,” says Dalén. “Later Umeå grew to become the primary [city] in Sweden to have a gender research professorship [Britt-Marie Thurén in 1997]. There has all the time been a robust ‘civil society’ motion right here.” A girls’s research course first appeared on the college curriculum in 1976. Two standard feminist radio programmes (Radio Ellen within the Nineteen Eighties and Freja within the Nineteen Nineties) and two of Sweden’s greatest feminist fanzines (Amazon and Radarka within the late Nineteen Nineties) all got here out of Umeå. Marie-Louise Rönnmark, who later went on to develop into mayor of the town, was among the many first to champion the thought of this place as “a gender-equal municipality” within the Nineteen Nineties.
The morning’s exercise is a workshop for major college instructing assistants, which appears to focus totally on making an attempt to get the individuals to simply accept the concept that girls don’t need to be the first mum or dad. Within the afternoon we observe the route of a specifically devised “gendered panorama” bus tour. The council could be very proud and enthusiastic about this tour, instigated as an exercise for visiting dignitaries. It takes in Umeå’s proudest architectural marvels and a couple of pedestrian crossing depicting bespoke “lady crossing” street indicators. (Each Dalén and Gustafsson had been ecstatic when the municipal street signal staff informed them that they had erected the indicators particularly in order that it doesn’t look as if the “lady crossing” signal is being “adopted” by the “man crossing” signal. However then the staff sheepishly admitted that that they had failed to do that constantly in any respect crossings. It’s the thought that counts.)
I’m barely dissatisfied to not be boarding a Scooby Doo-style Thriller Machine bus emblazoned with psychedelic portraits of Gloria Steinem. However at this time I’m the one customer on the tour, so we drive in a council-owned electrical automotive as an alternative. First cease is a prototype gender-aware bus cease. It options picket pods that rotate in an effort to both flip away from others and be non-public, or flip round and speak from the protection of your cocoon. The pods don’t go proper all the way down to the bottom, in an effort to see from a distance whether or not there’s anybody else on the bus cease. Neither can one “disguise” within the pods. “Civic societies are a vaccination in opposition to alienation and crime,” says Dalén.
However these concepts are additionally about taking a extra holistic view about “what everybody wants”. The bus cease construction is just not enclosed as a result of the planning analysis confirmed that even in freezing temperatures Swedes – women and men – will stand effectively away from a glass-encased bus cease. They like to face alone within the chilly than be heat and have to face subsequent to another person: “Folks right here don’t like enclosed areas or proximity to others.” Numerous “gender-equality” messaging, it appears, is about making an allowance for prevailing cultural norms, as a lot as making life simpler for girls.
Geography and local weather have performed an enormous position in Umeå’s inhabitants shopping for into these experimental concepts. It could possibly snow from October to April, and final yr in February temperatures dropped to -38C. “A really typical temperature is -5C,” says Gustafsson. Chilly climate consciousness usually trumps all different awarenesses. The pods on the bus cease are hanging on a mechanism that may be shunted to 1 facet so {that a} snowplough can cross by means of to clear the pavement. “However relating to clearing snow, if we prioritise vehicles then it means we’re prioritising males,” Janet Ågren, Umeå’s deputy mayor, tells me later. Girls, it seems, usually tend to be utilizing walkways and public transport. If there was any resistance to the gender-based initiatives within the metropolis, says Gustafsson, it’s typically linked to the prioritisation of clearing snow. “These methods [of re-allocating budget in order to benefit women] aren’t a secret,” she laughs. “However individuals are simply usually offended about snow-clearing. No matter how a lot is completed.”
There’s additionally a robust sense of defiance and having one thing to show right here. “We’re distant and much from Stockholm,” says Ågren. Stockholm is 400 miles south, a six-hour practice journey. “If we now have a state of affairs, we now have to resolve it ourselves. We’re very depending on one another. Folks have excessive belief as a result of there is no such thing as a different option to dwell. There’s a very low crime price. That’s not simply maintained, not least as a result of we now have a thousand folks transferring out and in every year with the college. However primarily we care for one another.” Umeå is the capital of Västerbotten County, residence to huge areas of wilderness, a land mass larger than Denmark or the Netherlands. The EU Regional Social Progress Index lists 50 separate traits that outline good dwelling, similar to well being, affect and improvement alternatives. Västerbotten is the area with the best rating within the EU.
“The north of Sweden is sparsely populated,” Dalén explains. “There are many stereotypes about us. ‘It’s all forest and there’s nothing there.’ However we’re among the many 10 greatest cities in Sweden.” Regardless of this, the county’s conventional coat of arms depicts a reindeer within the evening sky, three fish and a seemingly pre-historic man carrying a membership. Gustafsson provides: “There’s this fantasy of ‘the lonely man within the forest on his snowmobile’. However we’re an city feminist metropolis. For me this has all the time been about asking, ‘What does it imply to be a girl from the north?’”
Different highlights on the bus tour embody Umeå’s first preschool, based in 1966, years forward of Sweden’s Pre-College Act in 1975 which paved the best way for state-subsidised childcare for ages one to 5. “That wasn’t one thing that simply occurred. There was a whole lot of pushback and opposition,” says Gustafsson.
Not far away is Umeå’s 9,000-seat soccer stadium. Within the late Nineteen Nineties a call was taken to divide pitch practise hours in keeping with whichever soccer staff – male or feminine – was extra prone to win their league. Earlier than, the lads’s staff robotically received first dibs on practise hours, no matter their fortunes. Right here too, “there was a whole lot of protest”. However by the early 2000s Umeå had the perfect girls’s soccer staff in Sweden, had recruited Brazilian participant Marta Vieira da Silva (“the best lady soccer participant of all time”) and received the UEFA Girls’s Champions League twice, in 2003 and 2004. The success of the ladies’s staff started to spark outdoors curiosity in Umeå as a feminist case research. In 2004, Sweden’s greatest every day newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, ran the headline “How Umeå Grew to become a Profitable Feminist Stronghold”. The destiny of the ladies’s soccer staff (which ultimately suffered a fall from grace) illustrates your complete precept of Umeå’s equality-based social engineering. The concept is just not that one group ought to profit over one other within the long-term – as a result of that’s not equal – it’s merely that the taking part in area must be levelled so that everybody has the identical probabilities.
The identical precept applies on the subsequent cease on the tour: the Lev! (Swedish for “Stay!”) tunnel set up on the railway station. This underpass for pedestrians and cyclists is flooded with mild and you may see simply from one finish to the opposite, with no corners. “That is an anti-violence house. It’s an area the place you’ve gotten the notion of security,” Gustafsson says. “We will’t promise that nothing will ever occur. You can not construct an authorized ‘protected house’. However the level is that ladies aren’t afraid of public areas. They’re afraid of males in public areas.” Dalén considers it a needed and radical act that ladies ought to expertise public areas that really feel welcoming: “These are our public areas and we pay our taxes.” The glass tiles of the tunnel carry quotes from poet Sara Lidman (“I wish to watch the snow burn”) and a recording of her voice might be heard within the house. “Girls really feel extra comfy if they’ll hear the voice of one other lady. They don’t keep away from this tunnel.” I realise abruptly that I did really keep away from this tunnel. On my first day in Umeå, once I arrived on the station, my pure intuition was to cross the traffic-heavy street above as an alternative. That is the form of inbuilt mentality – one the place you are taking a “safer route” that really places you at a larger statistical threat – that these initiatives are attempting to problem.
“Folks speak about security and safety,” says Gustafsson, “However for me, that is too low an ambition. To say that your ambition is that ladies shouldn’t really feel scared in your public areas? Actually? It’s too low a bar. Wouldn’t it’s extra visionary to say: that is the place you possibly can categorical your self? The important thing query is to ask how straightforward life is being made for everybody.” Within the early days of Umeå’s gender research work on the college, the first query was: “Who has the facility to plan the town?” The reply till about 50 years in the past was, in fact, males. “Now the form of questions we ask are these: Who visits this park? Who makes use of this bike lane? Who is part of this dialogue? Who’s excluded? Why is that group under-represented on this dialogue? The info that we now have – is it gender-segregated? We don’t do all the things completely on a regular basis, in fact. However on the political degree we now have received to some extent the place there’s all the time somebody who will ask, ‘Why is that this lacking?’” Everybody concerned in political, social and cultural choices right here is used to asking, “Who would possibly we now have not noted?” A small, humble factor to recollect to ask, however a query that makes all of the distinction.
Is there anybody who disagrees with all this or resents the price of the creative tunnel and gleaming purple puma? “I’m unsure that the typical particular person on the road would know that each one these items have been carried out with gender equality in thoughts,” says deputy mayor Ågren. “However once you ask folks about ‘sense of security’ or ‘belonging’ then Umeå compares very effectively with different cities.”
And what about males? “By way of backlash from males, I’d say it comes from just a few people who would possibly really feel not noted of the change,” says Mikael Brändström, director of improvement at Umeå metropolis council. “However these voices are uncommon, and I’ve observed that many males, particularly youthful generations, see the upside of dwelling in a extra equal society. I personally see these efforts benefiting us all. Equality isn’t nearly equity – it makes life smoother. Who doesn’t need much less drama over whose flip it’s to make use of the soccer area?”
Gustafsson says the important thing to most individuals going together with all these concepts is that they’re fundamental widespread sense: “When an Italian colleague was introducing me and explaining the work we do, she mentioned, ‘Their strategies aren’t sophisticated. They simply do the work.’”
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