Nordic urban history and urban historians in the last decade

Abstract

To people from the Continent, like the German essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Norwegians seem to be something of an urban puzzle. While crowding in towns and cities — about three-quarters of the population now live in urban settlements — the minds and lifestyles of Norwegians, their concept of the good life, are stubbornly rural. More or less the same applies to the Finns. The Danes, on the other hand, are conceived as quite the opposite, a fundamentally urban nation. The Swedes fall somewhere in between.Differences in urban attitudes, as well as other diversities between the Nordic countries, are cherished among the inhabitants themselves, although most people are well aware that the culturally unifying elements are strong, too. The variations are real, however, and different urban experiences may partly account for them. Take the case of nineteenth-century urbanization, with examples extracted from the 1977 Trondheim Nordic history conference report on urbanization.