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Small vehicles of Sandhamn
How a picturesque island setting for a small Swedish follow-up to Small Vehicles of Tokyo is an unlikely contender for a 15-minute city case study. And yet …
Number two in an occasional series, following Small Vehicles of Tokyo and preceding Small Vehicles of Shanghai — Deepseeking the city, and the forthcoming Small Vehicles of Bangkok. These are part of my series exploring technology and the city, But What Was The Question?
Admittedly, it’s drawing a long bow to see anything in common between the megacity sprawled along the Honshu coastline and a tiny island at the outer edge of the Stockholm archipelago. They may as well be the product of entirely different species, despite the allusions to shared sensibilities between Nippon and the Nordics.
Yet on a brief trip to Sandhamn, a day after posting about the Small Vehicles of Tokyo, I found myself reflecting on how another island—albeit one about 27 hectares big with only a few hundred permanent inhabitants—had also produced a fine diversity of small vehicles to get around in the absence of the numbing homogeneity of cars.
Sandhamn is so tiny that it has continued to buck the trend that took hold elsewhere in 1950s Sweden; the bo med bil (‘life with car’) lifestyle that…
