ABSTRACT
The reconstruction of Stockholm city centre in the 1950s and 1960s must surely be one of Europe’s largest and most radical urban development projects. At a time when people elsewhere were taking pains to build up what had been destroyed during the war, the municipal offi cials of Stockholm were systematically tearing down much of the city centre (see fi g. 6.1). In no other post-war European capital was the city centre redeveloped to anything like this extent, with the possible exception of Bucharest. As the city commissioner Joakim Garpe put it in a decisive debate in the city council in 1963, Norrmalm was to be adapted to ‘the capital’s special role as leader’, to become ‘a display window for Sweden, a worthy refl ection of the modern welfare state’.
