What I have learned from Gärdet

Moving out of the apartment on Gärdet. After a month I’ve learned something. Not about Gärdet — about Stockholm.

Give me any neighborhood in this city and I’ll give you the same truth.

It doesn’t matter where. Kungsholmen, Hökarängen, Östermalm, Södermalm, Gubbängen, Sköndal, Ekhagen. Yes, even Rinkeby. I have never met anyone in Stockholm who isn’t patriotically in love with the area where they live.

The only problem they keep repeating is that they don’t understand why more of their friends won’t move there.

My only previous friend on Gärdet, G, has now moved away. Not because he wanted to. Instead he has become Kungsholmen’s new advocate. After a walk around the island he compares Kungsholmen to Rome and Mallorca.

Since G no longer lives here, I get my introduction to Gärdet from an acquaintance through work. We go to Stockholm Glass- och Pastahus, Tessinparken, and share a bun at a small café whose name I can’t be bothered to look up now. Not bad, but that quiet neighborhood feeling becomes like another person in the room. Someone I don’t want to spend time with.

The rest I get to discover on my own.

May with its blossoming trees helps. Every day I come back to the big yellow housing blocks. The functionalist-utopian.

When S sleeps over and asks how many people live in the building, I answer ironically: 5,000. And to the question of how many floors: 25.

There are streets here I’ve never walked, which rarely happens in Stockholm. I talk to a handful of people. All of them somehow manage to express the patriotism this text is supposed to be about.

It should be said honestly. For me, Gärdet has never had much pull. The same way I like Kungsholmen because it’s close to Vasastan, I like Gärdet because it’s close to Östermalm and Djurgården.

But I’ve been happier here than I want to admit.

I’m now landing temporarily in Bromma. Easy to defend and build walls around. But it has nothing to do with suburban gardens. The same syndrome exists everywhere in Stockholm, whatever the metro station.

People love the patch of ground they’re standing on.

This is not universally human. Soon I’m going to Italy. I have never met an Italian who’s happy where he is.

In Milan you live there because the jobs aren’t anywhere else, in Florence you think the city is stuck in the past, and in Rome you think Instagram has ruined the city forever.

There is only one group that loves Italy and wants more people to move there.

The Stockholmers.