Location: walk from one end of Haga Nygata to the other.
Duration: about 15 minutes

We were immediately struck by the scale of the Haga.

All the buildings seem smaller. Walking down the cobble stone streets, I feel I’m in a different place — even the trams feel far away, they respect the boundaries. History is on display here: this place is the anti-Nordstan. The cobblestones on the streets assert the rights of the pedestrian to stroll, look, and listen.

As visitors, we can only wonder about the past here. What were the lives like of people who lived here years ago? To see buildings preserved so well is also to be reminded of the aesthetic component of history. Surely, things were not always so clean here. I think it was a living quarter of workers.

To me, it is interesting that these seemingly older streets exhibit a pure horizontal and vertical grid, crossing at right angles. Much of the city seems to have been planned in such an organized fashion, or perhaps rebuilt that way.

This is another area of the city where the effects of shadow and light are dramatic and part of the fabric of living space. Some streets, late in the day, seem perpetually cast in faint shadow, with the sunlight relegated to the courtyards within.

It is interesting to observe how different parts of the city become social gathering places at different times of day, and attract different types of people. After visiting the Haga in the late afternoon on a sunny day and finding it quite crowded, it is surprising to see how quiet it is in the morning and in the later part of the evening.

There are, in the city, noticeable differences between places through which the trams pass and those areas away from them. It’s not just noise or excitement, the wires overhead and the tracks below.  I see the contrast between the public functional view of place to be passed through, and the private codes of daily life.

The Haga is easy to regard as a ‘destination’. I think part of that is a sense of community. Even if this is only a perception, the perception is the basis for the drive to connect, to reinforce the feeling of belonging to the city, to be reminded of the city itself, that lies underneath the daily ritual of comings and goings.