While living in Tensta, I often ran into a man who kept birds. Late one night we heard this wonderful creature and listened, exchanging smiles, for a long while. This is the first recording, and this bird joins the dawn chorus in Vädersolsmodernitet, which can be heard here. The second recording is a montage of recordings taken in Tensta's vibrant centrum. I used some of the original recordings in Ghost Installation: Internationella biblioteket, which can be heard here.
Tensta is one of the Stockholm miljonprogram suburbs. Sadly, the area has been maligned by images of poverty and crime. One has only to look at a newspaper in any given week or two, to see how this neighborhood has been branded with those images, while the rest of the life of the community here has been soundly ignored.1 Tensta is, in fact, a thriving neighborhood.The centrum is happily unusual:the businesses there are owned entirely by local proprietors. Grocers, restaurants, cafes, clothing, houseware and fabric shops line the corridors, and there is a large open air vegetable market in the middle of the square. There is also an art museum, Tensta Konsthall,which is both a national venue and an animated localgathering place. Thereare parks, community gardens and even an old church with traditional Swedish Kurbits drawings from hundreds of years ago, still in traces on the walls, surrounding the area. My neighbors there hailed from every corner of the globe.
In her book The Death and Life and Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote about the North End of Boston in the mid-20th century. Like Tensta, the North End was marred by similar malignment against the largely immigrant Italian community there. No bank would give loans to the people who lived or operated businesses in the neighborhood, and when Jacobs talked to a city planner about the area, he exclaimed that it was only a "slum".Yet Jacobs was delighted and inspired by what she found when she walked the streets of the North End.2 In the absence of the powers that be, a diversity of street life, local businesses and organizations had blossomed throughout the area, giving the lie to the ill-conceived characterization of whole neighborhoods, full of all kinds of people, as utsatt område ("crime-ridden, unsafe areas"). In Skogen är bäst på bild, which can be heard here, one of the people who I interviewed – who has been very involved in community organizing in her own neighborhood in Solna and in studying the history of miljonprogram areas in Stockholm – declares that "Jane Jacobs är min gudinna!" ("Jane Jacobs is my Goddess!"). For Jacobs, diversity was the key element to creating a meaningful, safe and high quality life for those who lived in the cities of the United States – and Tensta is rich in diversity.
Tensta's grand, miljonprogram era community center and library, Tensta Träff, was sold off in recent years to a private company.3 The library has been moved into small, dingy quarters on the square. A combination welfare, unemployment, tax and pension office has been put right inside the room where reading and study should have taken place. The loud complaint from the neighborhood has largely gone ignored. This is a good example of the way neighborhoods have their voices taken away, when all that news outlets and politicians are willing to focus on is crime and social problems, ignoring all the many other aspects of the community. But the peace of listening to a night bird with one of my neighbors, combined with the burgeoning neighborhood life in the centrum, is what characterizes this place for me. Tensta tells another story, if only you will listen.