Turning a post-industrial area into a pioneering sustainable neighbourhood
The story below by Agostino Petroni, with photos by Alessandro Gandolfi, is a shortened version of an article from 2023. It was produced with the support of the European Climate Foundation and originally published here.
On a sunny mid-June morning, young fathers pushed babies in prams as they walked along a canal in the Royal Seaport neighbourhood in northern Stockholm, Sweden. Young mothers experimented with post-natal yoga positions in a park while bicycles zoomed by on freshly asphalted bike lanes. Squared geometry of various colours and forms shaped the surrounding buildings. Just a handful of cars were being driven on the streets. Still, a constant hum of construction work filled the air. This tranquil image hid an ambitious sustainable neighbourhood project in the making.
"It's not a one-off project where you invest a lot of effort in building just one or two houses," says Staffan Lorentz, head of development for the Royal Seaport. It will be much more than that. Indeed, by 2035, the Royal Seaport is expected to become one of Europe's largest innovative urban developments, counting 12,000 new homes and 35,000 workplaces, covering an area of over 236 hectares (583 acres).
From a technical point of view, the knowledge needed to make new energy-efficient homes that do not contribute to climate change, while meeting the increasing demand for housing, is available to decision-makers around the world. And yet, making this transition comes with substantial economic costs and requires planning with a long-term vision.
Lawmakers, city planners, and citizens are grappling with recurring questions: Where will it be feasible to build large-scale sustainable housing? Who will be able to afford to live in it? And what does "sustainable" actually mean?
Stockholm is trying to find some answers.
"There were only two football pitches here before," says Michele Montanari, a 35-year-old restaurateur. With his father, Sergio, who moved to Stockholm from Italy in the 1970s, he checked out the Royal Seaport neighbourhood and one of its new restaurants, Ocra. Sergio Montanari looked around the large restaurant dining hall and remembered how rugged the place looked until a few years ago.
Once a hunting ground for the Swedish royal family, this area of Stockholm became an industrial harbour, starting in the 1850s, and then a gasworks site that supplied energy for heating, lighting and cooking for the city’s residents.
In the 1970s, when the need for new housing arose, the city council started to look at the area as a possible location for new developments, says Lorentz. But it wasn't until the late 2000s that, after much pushback because of concerns about the environmental impact of new development on the close by National City Park, that the project began to shape up.
The City of Stockholm decided to invest 2.2 billion euros in building all the necessary infrastructure – roads, parks, schools, and public transportation – and to lease out or sell the building of houses to developers who respected its sustainability standards. For example, one requirement was to ensure that a house would not consume more than 55 kWh per square meter a year, including heating, hot water, and building electricity. This is 30% less than the current national average.
"Plans for this area are unique," said Niclas De Lorenzi, a business developer at Stockholm Exergi, the city’s energy provider. He says that soon they will extract energy from waste with their large-scale Bio-Energy Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) project, which will capture and permanently store large quantities of CO2.
So far, about 25% of the Royal Seaport project has been completed, and around 600 companies are established in the area. Some of them finding a home inside refurbished industrial red brick buildings designed by the Swedish architect Ferdinand Boberg at the end of the 19th century. 3,000 new housing units are currently occupied, with more under construction.
Wearing a fluorescent yellow vest, Lorentz walked me underneath Gasklocka 2, a tall colosseum-like red structure that once housed the gas that heated the city. It appeared hollow, with only the outside frame standing, but it will soon host two arenas for concerts and events.
As we watched construction workers prepare the new structure's foundation, Lorentz said that the Royal Seaport was something new and that things would adjust and improve. "We are in the learning phase," Lorentz said.
“Inch by inch, this project will show what works and what doesn't, and it can lead the way for other development projects in Stockholm,” and, maybe, elsewhere.
Agostino Petroni is an Italian journalist, author, and a 2021 Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellow. His work appears in several outlets, including National Geographic, The Washington Post, and the BBC.
Article Published: 24/04/2025 Updated: 27/05/2025