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The big red puma is the focal point of Umeå. The world’s first publicly commissioned statue dedicated to the #MeToo movement depicts a snarling cat atop a steel frame designed to imitate prison bars. Its official title, according to its artist creator Camilla Akraka, is Listen but everyone just calls it “puman” – the Puma. Since it appeared in the main square in front of the old city hall in 2019, it has become the crowning symbol for this quiet, unassuming place a few hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle, known to some as “the most feminist city in the world”.

Umeå (pronounced oo-may-yoh, population 134,000) is famous in Sweden as the home of radical ideas and of “the red university” – during the 70s, the city hosted a large number of student strikes and left-wing, politically active students. A Swedish friend tells me that “everyone in Umeå is heavily into punk”. This seems to be a sort of code to mean that Umeå is thought of – and thinks of itself – as essentially “cool”. Even the website of Visit Umeå, the local tourist board, claims that the city has “the beardiest and most heavily tattooed population in the world”. Boringly, this does not refer to the women.

So what makes Umeå such a great place to be a woman? To find out, I spend a day shadowing Annika Dalén and Linda Gustafsson, the city council’s gender equality officers. It would be hard to find anyone on Earth who is more enthusiastic about the exciting world of “gender awareness in the urban environment” than these two.

An instant example, close to the puma, down towards the river, is a swinging seat where I feel unusually comfortable. Why? The seat was commissioned as part of a special project that canvassed the views of teenage girls, and is designed with average female height in mind: 165cm, my height. I’m not about to demand that every piece of municipal furniture in the world be created to my precise specifications. But it’s nice to experience it for once.

Viv Groskop at the red panther statue in Umeå, Sweden. Photograph: Elin Berge

“When the university was founded here [in 1965], it was a time of progressive ideas in Sweden,” says Dalén. “Later Umeå became the first [city] in Sweden to have a gender studies professorship [Britt-Marie Thurén in 1997]. There has always been a strong ‘civil society’ movement here.” A women’s studies course first appeared on the university curriculum in 1976. Two popular feminist radio programmes (Radio Ellen in the 1980s and Freja in the 1990s) and two of Sweden’s biggest feminist fanzines (Amazon and Radarka in the late 1990s) all came out of Umeå. Marie-Louise Rönnmark, who later went on to become mayor of the city, was among the first to champion the idea of this place as “a gender-equal municipality” in the 1990s.

The morning’s activity is a workshop for primary school teaching assistants, which seems to focus mostly on trying to get the participants to accept the idea that women don’t have to be the primary parent. In the afternoon we follow the route of a specially devised “gendered landscape” bus tour. The council is very proud and excited about this tour, instigated as an activity for visiting dignitaries. It takes in Umeå’s proudest architectural marvels and more than one pedestrian crossing depicting bespoke “woman crossing” road signs. (Both Dalén and Gustafsson were ecstatic when the municipal road sign team told them they had erected the signs especially so that it doesn’t look as if the “woman crossing” sign is being “followed” by the “man crossing” sign. But then the team sheepishly admitted that they had failed to do this consistently at all crossings. It’s the thought that counts.)

The writer traversing a road with a “woman crossing” sign. Photograph: Elin Berge

I am slightly disappointed not to be boarding a Scooby Doo-style Mystery Machine bus emblazoned with psychedelic portraits of Gloria Steinem. But today I am the only visitor on the tour, so we drive in a council-owned electric car instead. First stop is a prototype gender-aware bus stop. It features wooden pods that rotate so that you can either turn away from others and be private, or turn around and talk from the safety of your cocoon. The pods don’t go right down to the ground, so that you can see from a distance whether there is anyone else at the bus stop. Neither can one “hide” in the pods. “Civic societies are a vaccination against alienation and crime,” says Dalén.

But these ideas are also about taking a more holistic view about “what everyone needs”. The bus stop structure is not enclosed because the planning research showed that even in freezing temperatures Swedes – men and women – will stand well away from a glass-encased bus stop. They prefer to stand alone in the cold than be warm and have to stand next to someone else: “People here do not like enclosed spaces or proximity to others.” A lot of “gender-equality” messaging, it seems, is about taking into account prevailing cultural norms, as much as making life easier for women.

Geography and climate have played a big role in Umeå’s population buying into these experimental ideas. It can snow from October to April, and last year in February temperatures dropped to -38C. “A very usual temperature is -5C,” says Gustafsson. Cold weather awareness generally trumps all other awarenesses. The pods at the bus stop are hanging on a mechanism that can be shunted to one side so that a snowplough can pass through to clear the pavement. “But when it comes to clearing snow, if we prioritise cars then it means we are prioritising men,” Janet Ågren, Umeå’s deputy mayor, tells me later. Women, it turns out, are more likely to be using walkways and public transport. If there has been any resistance to the gender-based initiatives in the city, says Gustafsson, it is often connected to the prioritisation of clearing snow. “These strategies [of re-allocating budget in order to benefit women] are not a secret,” she laughs. “But people are just generally angry about snow-clearing. Regardless of how much is done.”

There’s also a strong sense of defiance and having something to prove here. “We are remote and far from Stockholm,” says Ågren. Stockholm is 400 miles south, a six-hour train journey. “If we have a situation, we have to solve it ourselves. We are very dependent on each other. People have high trust because there is no other way to live. There is a very low crime rate. That’s not easily maintained, not least because we have a thousand people moving in and out each year with the university. But essentially we take care of each other.” Umeå is the capital of Västerbotten County, home to vast areas of wilderness, a land mass bigger than Denmark or the Netherlands. The EU Regional Social Progress Index lists 50 separate characteristics that define good living, such as health, influence and development opportunities. Västerbotten is the region with the highest score in the EU.

“The north of Sweden is sparsely populated,” Dalén explains. “There are lots of stereotypes about us. ‘It’s all forest and there’s nothing there.’ But we are among the 10 biggest cities in Sweden.” Despite this, the county’s traditional coat of arms depicts a reindeer in the night sky, three fish and a seemingly pre-historic man carrying a club. Gustafsson adds: “There is this myth of ‘the lonely man in the forest on his snowmobile’. But we are an urban feminist city. For me this has always been about asking, ‘What does it mean to be a woman from the north?’”

Gustafsson and Dalén make use of Umeå’s prototype gender-aware bus stop. Photograph: Elin Berge

Other highlights on the bus tour include Umeå’s first preschool, founded in 1966, years ahead of Sweden’s Pre-School Act in 1975 which paved the way for state-subsidised childcare for ages one to five. “That wasn’t something that just happened. There was a lot of pushback and opposition,” says Gustafsson.

Round the corner is Umeå’s 9,000-seat football stadium. In the late 1990s a decision was taken to divide pitch practise hours according to whichever football team – male or female – was more likely to win their league. Before, the men’s team automatically got first dibs on practise hours, regardless of their fortunes. Here too, “there was a lot of protest”. But by the early 2000s Umeå had the best women’s football team in Sweden, had recruited Brazilian player Marta Vieira da Silva (“the greatest woman football player of all time”) and won the UEFA Women’s Champions League twice, in 2003 and 2004. The success of the women’s team began to spark outside interest in Umeå as a feminist case study. In 2004, Sweden’s biggest daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, ran the headline “How Umeå Became a Successful Feminist Stronghold”. The fate of the women’s football team (which eventually suffered a fall from grace) illustrates the entire principle of Umeå’s equality-based social engineering. The idea is not that one group should benefit over another in the long-term – because that’s not equal – it’s simply that the playing field should be levelled so that everyone has the same chances.

The same principle applies at the next stop on the tour: the Lev! (Swedish for “Live!”) tunnel installation at the railway station. This underpass for pedestrians and cyclists is flooded with light and you can see easily from one end to the other, with no corners. “This is an anti-violence space. It’s a space where you have the perception of safety,” Gustafsson says. “We can’t promise that nothing will ever happen. You cannot build a certified ‘safe space’. But the point is that women are not afraid of public spaces. They are afraid of men in public spaces.” Dalén considers it a necessary and radical act that women should experience public spaces that feel welcoming: “These are our public spaces and we pay our taxes.” The glass tiles of the tunnel carry quotes from poet Sara Lidman (“I want to watch the snow burn”) and a recording of her voice can be heard in the space. “Women feel more comfortable if they can hear the voice of another woman. They don’t avoid this tunnel.” I realise suddenly that I did actually avoid this tunnel. On my first day in Umeå, when I arrived at the station, my natural instinct was to cross the traffic-heavy road above instead. This is the kind of inbuilt mentality – one where you take a “safer route” that actually puts you at a greater statistical risk – that these initiatives are trying to challenge.

‘This is an anti-violence space’ … Lev!, a glass artwork in a pedestrian tunnel at Umeå’s railway station. Photograph: Elin Berge

“People talk about safety and security,” says Gustafsson, “But for me, this is too low an ambition. To say that your ambition is that women should not feel scared in your public spaces? Really? It’s too low a bar. Wouldn’t it be more visionary to say: this is where you can express yourself? The key question is to ask how easy life is being made for everyone.” In the early days of Umeå’s gender studies work at the university, the primary question was: “Who has the power to plan the city?” The answer until about 50 years ago was, of course, men. “Now the kind of questions we ask are these: Who visits this park? Who uses this bike lane? Who is a part of this dialogue? Who is excluded? Why is that group under-represented in this dialogue? The data that we have – is it gender-segregated? We don’t do everything perfectly all the time, of course. But at the political level we have got to a point where there is always someone who will ask, ‘Why is this missing?’” Everyone involved in political, social and cultural decisions here is used to asking, “Who might we have left out?” A small, humble thing to remember to ask, but a question that makes all the difference.

Groskop reclines on Frizon in Årstidernas park – social seating designed it in collaboration with local teenage girls. Photograph: Elin Berge

Is there anyone who disagrees with all this or resents the cost of the artistic tunnel and gleaming red puma? “I’m not sure that the average person on the street would know that all these things have been done with gender equality in mind,” says deputy mayor Ågren. “But when you ask people about ‘sense of safety’ or ‘belonging’ then Umeå compares very well with other cities.”

And what about men? “In terms of backlash from men, I’d say it comes from a few individuals who might feel left out of the change,” says Mikael Brändström, director of development at Umeå city council. “But those voices are rare, and I’ve noticed that many men, especially younger generations, see the upside of living in a more equal society. I personally see these efforts benefiting us all. Equality isn’t just about fairness – it makes life smoother. Who doesn’t want less drama over whose turn it is to use the football field?”

Gustafsson says the key to most people going along with all these ideas is that they are basic common sense: “When an Italian colleague was introducing me and explaining the work we do, she said, ‘Their methods are not complicated. They just do the work.’”

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