{"id":343,"date":"2010-01-13T11:09:42","date_gmt":"2010-01-13T15:09:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/?p=343"},"modified":"2010-01-13T11:09:42","modified_gmt":"2010-01-13T15:09:42","slug":"umea-biggest-in-the-north","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/umea-biggest-in-the-north\/","title":{"rendered":"Ume\u00e5, biggest in the North"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once past the first third of Sweden you have left all the bigger cities behind, with only Ume\u00e5 remaining. Ume\u00e5 is the city with most residents in the upper two thirds of Sweden. About 700 km north of the capital Stockholm, right along the coast, Ume\u00e5 has close to 113 000 inhabitants in its municipality. Closer to 8 out of 9 million people live in the southern most third of Sweden, while the remaining 1 million people have their pick of the rest. Geographically Sweden is the third largest country in Europe, hard to believe but true… <\/span><\/p>\n

Another name for Ume\u00e5 is \u2018The city of birches\u2019 (Bj\u00f6rkarnas Stad)<\/strong>. It is referred to as that because of a terrible fire in 1888 when the whole city burned down. After the fire, birches were planted alongside as many avenues as possible in case of another fire. The birches were supposed to hold enough water that the fire wouldn\u2019t spread, acting as a fire break.<\/span><\/p>\n

Just this autumn Ume\u00e5 was elected Capital of Culture for Europe (Kultur Huvudstad)<\/strong>. Ume\u00e5 was competing against another Swedish city in the south called Lund. Ume\u00e5 winning came as a surprise to quite a few people. Being the Capital of Culture made Ume\u00e5\u2019s politicians want to display the very best of Ume\u00e5\u2019s already existing culture, at least for the first couple of weeks after Ume\u00e5 had been declared winner. There has also been a lot of talk about all the things that are planned for Ume\u00e5, many are sceptical to what will actually happen… Though let\u2019s not darken the spirit. <\/span><\/p>\n

During the Autumn there were a few misguided attempts to improve the cultural appearance in the city centre, though the \u201cmisguided\u201d part is only the opinion of some. The topic did spark a lot of discussion in Ume\u00e5\u2019s local newspapers debating if the money should be spent on plastic roses that a lot of people felt looked like garbage. Eventually the heated discussions died down and are now forgotten along with the sculptures, which were removed for Winter. Work has almost been completed on a much more positive project, a skate-board park. This project was started after many years\u2019 of requests from a lot of young people, and now it is finally finished. It will be usable in the spring when the meter of snow that have covered Ume\u00e5 melts. More projects like this should be started in 2010 if things go as planned. <\/span><\/p>\n

One reason Ume\u00e5 so many people is because it has a university and a big hospital, these two are major employment sources. The other is the truck-cab manufacturing and assembling factory. When VOLVO lastvagnar<\/strong> had to start laying off people who had been working there, some for 20 years or more, because of the financial crisis it struck a lot of families\u2019 economies hard, especially if both parents worked there. That left people unemployed, many without more than a senior high school education. Most of the factory workers started working straight out of school and have developed very good skills within one area making it hard to find a job within another profession.<\/p>\n

Trollh\u00e4ttan could be considered Sweden\u2019s industrial area, with almost all of its citizens working at the SAAB factory (fabrik)<\/strong>. When SAAB went bankrupt very <\/em>many people lost their jobs. Considering how many people are unemployed (arbetsl\u00f6sa)<\/strong>, Trollh\u00e4ttan\u2019s people are very positive, believing in a bright future in just a couple of years. Not just in Trollh\u00e4ttan and Ume\u00e5 but in all of Sweden the number of people unemployed is at a record high level. <\/span><\/p>\n

Is your city being affected in any way by the financial crisis? Please tell us about it, maybe through reading about how it is affecting others your situation won\u2019t seem so bad. Or maybe this crisis will feel more real to those who aren\u2019t affected at all.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once past the first third of Sweden you have left all the bigger cities behind, with only Ume\u00e5 remaining. Ume\u00e5 is the city with most residents in the upper two thirds of Sweden. About 700 km north of the capital Stockholm, right along the coast, Ume\u00e5 has close to 113 000 inhabitants in its municipality…<\/p>\n

Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[3135,3190,3384,3489,3495,3497,3512],"class_list":["post-343","post","type-post","status-publish","hentry","category-culture","tag-capital-of-culture","tag-financial-crisis","tag-saab","tag-trollhattan","tag-umea","tag-unemployment","tag-volvo"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}