That was a lovely week, though: it’s a fine thing to be feted by one’s academic peers, of course, but the older I get, the more I view being put up for a few days in a quiet room with a good desk and south-facing windows as the real treat. I could do without the formal dinners, that’s for sure! But some things never change: deans and funders want to talk to the talent, even if they don’t much care to see the work once it’s done.

Still, the work has always come with some sort of price, as I’m sure you recall. I suppose I’m willing to accept the occasional bout of indigestion—both alimentary and conversational!—in preference to the bad old days of third-stage funding bids. But the bloating didn’t make the first day of cycling eastwards any easier, that’s for sure. That whole morning, I could imagine you telling me that there’s no shame in someone of our age opting for a tricycle with a big battery beneath its banquette seat… and in Södermalm, you would be right, as you always are.  Ah, but our country cousins here in the south, dear Annika, they are made of sterner stuff—or one must at least assume their posteriors are. Oh, the things we do for anthropology!

My tenderised buttocks notwithstanding, the project is going well, and it’s a delight to be cycling around in a big mob through a Skåne which is now almost devoid of cars. These young researchers out of Lund and Malmö are full of vigour and new ideas, and inexplicably delighted to be accompanied by some old fogey who wrote their doctoral thesis over three decades ago. They let me keep my hand in, so to speak, but they’re doing most of the ethnographic work themselves: all the theories and paradigms have changed since our day, so there’s no point me mucking in with my outdated methods.

But of course I’m surrounded by potential informants all day—and it seems that villagers are just as keen to talk to a willing ear as they ever were. I thus hope to gather some skånska gems for my Transition Years book while I’m down here… gems like the one I stumbled over earlier today, in fact, which I will transcribe for you here!

So, picture the scene: setting off from Trelleborg immediately after breakfast, we followed what used to be the old Route 9 kustvägen, and our little pedal-powered convoy arrived in Abbekås around time for fika. The harbour of this little fiskeby has moved somewhat, chased by rising sea levels, but there’s a cute little fleet of small boats moored up by the relatively recent piers, which I’m told are as much for harvesting ocean vegetation as for fish and crabs. (We have been promised fresh fruits of the sea for this evening’s supper, which I’m looking forward to a lot!) Right by the piers sits something approximating a village square, done with old-fashioned cobbles and everything, where a very practical little market sets itself up three or four times a week. Such a square is very normal by the standards of Skåne in 2055, you would think, but for one anomaly: a huge car, parked right in the middle.

It was one of those Tesla sports models—do you remember? Big ugly things, made by that awful man, what was his name? It reminded me of just how huge cars got, before they suddenly started to disappear entirely. But here one was, in a tiny Skånsk seaside village, occupying a space you might once have seen occupied by a statue of some historical notable. There must be a story here, I told myself—hardly my most penetrating insight, perhaps, but no less true for that!

The local oldsters were plentiful at the square, as you would expect on so fine a day, so I asked them if they could tell me who the car belonged to. Oh yes, they said, that’s Herr Klein’s car. Does he drive it often, I asked? No, Herr Klein hasn’t driven the car for more than twenty years.

At this point I was still assuming—shame on me—that Herr Klein was some eccentric local who had hung on to his car long past the point of nostalgia. But it turns out the story’s even better than that! So here it is, as narrated to me yesterday by one Kalle Ekström, with the interruptions and additions from his cronies edited out for clarity:

I’ll tell you this one, as I was here that day. I had been a builder, see? Not much work for builders in those days—Övergångslagen, you remember how it was, all retrofitting and repair rather than proper construction. I was still a bit resentful at the time, really. Government over-reach, we used to say—big fuss about nothing! But each year the old harbour would drown a little bit more… and then the county sent word that the harbour would be rebuilt, using local labour. So that’s what I was doing when Herr Klein came to town.

It was a sunny day, mid-June, much like this one—the time of year when you Stockholmers used to start arriving, eh, back in the old days? Now, this wasn’t that long ago… but it was before they resurfaced the old kustvägen and put in the light rail lines, which may have been part of the problem. But anyway, sunny day, quite warm, and me and a couple of other lads are down here placing those weird blocks… you see ‘em down there under the water, sort of perforated concrete blocks? Some sort of special concrete, they told me, and perforated so all the weed and little critters can live in the holes.

So yeah—me and the lads, we’re lifting these into the water with a little lifter-shifter, getting the foundations for the new harbour laid in. Only now we’re on a break, because it’s pretty hot, you know. So we’re sat here on the square—only there wasn’t a square them, just a little gravelled area at the end of the road off the kustvägen. We’re having a fika—under a parasol, of course, because you gotta health and safety when it’s government work, you know. And we’re sitting there when that car comes rolling down here super slowly, stops up in front of us, and this little man gets out.

Now, like I said, this was before they’d taken up the kustvägen, before the light-rail line went in. But the taxes meant that pretty much everyone round here was already on bikes or in busses to get around, because you just couldn’t, you know? So we’d sometimes see little pick-up trucks doing deliveries from Trelleborg or Ystad—you remember, the little Chinese ones?—but actual cars, they’d mostly gone already. It all happened very suddenly, didn’t it? Like, one day they were gone, and it was weird, but then after a few years it wasn’t weird, it was just how it was. It was quite nice, really.

But then that thing turns up—like a ghost, or maybe like a bit of a dream that you’d forgotten having, you know? And out gets Herr Klein—a very small man, dressed like one of those start-up types, you remember, like hoodie and jeans but really expensive—and he points at me.

“You there,” he says—in English, but like how a German would talk English, you know? “You there,” he says, “where is the garage in this town?” And I tell him that there’s no garage, hasn’t been a garage in Abbekås since maybe the twentieth century. (I was guessing on the dates, but I reckon I was right.)

“I need to charge my car!” he says. And by this point Frau Klein and their two kids have also gotten out of the car, and Frau Klein, maybe I’m misremembering, but she looked kinda tired of it all, you know? Like being out for a drive with Herr Klein was not the finest thing she could think of to be doing. And the kids, well—when did you ever see teenagers who looked happy to be stood around while one of their parents makes a fool of themselves?

“I need to charge my car!” he says again, as if maybe we hadn’t heard him the first time, and I tell him there used to be a public charge-point about a kilometer up the road in Mossbystrand, and that’s where the little Chinese trucks went to charge, so maybe he could try there.

“I will need you to tow me,” he says, and by this point the lads with me are trying not to laugh, and so am I, but it’s getting harder. “I can’t tow you”, I tell him, “because I don’t have a car.” “Use that machine instead”, he says, pointing at the lifter-shifter.

“Can’t do that”, I tell him—“it’s from the government, geo-fenced. Can’t take it off the harbour zone, here.”

“This is ridiculous,” he says, he’s waving his hands around in the air like this, and I’m thinking, well, something here is ridiculous, certainly!

But you want to help, you know? Person’s got a problem, you want to help them—even when they’re making it as hard as possible for both of you. Now, after he suggested that me and the lads should push his car to Mossbystrand, they stopped finding it so funny—thing with those Teslas, they were really heavy, not just the battery but all the bodywork and everything. I mean, we could have done it, I’m sure! But it would have taken most of the rest of the day. And sure, you want to help people—but by this point it was obvious that there wouldn’t be a lot of thanks for it, you know. Maybe that’s why Mikael piped up and said “We can just charge your car here in the village, Herr Klein.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so before,” says Herr Klein.

“You didn’t ask,” says Mikael, his face is as straight as rule, and by this point the Klein kids are looking a bit less detached, like they’re tuned in to what’s going on, you know. You got the feeling that the Klein household was probably a pretty serious place most of the time, that it probably wasn’t much fun.

“Let’s go check the sockets, see if your charger cable will fit, or if we’ll need an adapter,” says Mikael, and so Herr Klein has his son get the cable out of the trunk of the Tesla, and we all start trooping up the gravel path toward the old kustvägen, and the gym at the centre of the village. On our way up, I start to get some of the story. The Kleins had decided—well, one of the Kleins had decided—that they were going to tour southern Sweden for the summer. So the man of the house just drives them up to Travemunde, bit north of Hamburg I think, and onto the ferry there because, as he says to me, “it would be unsustainable to drive all the way.”

And it turns out that Frau Klein has developed quite a skill for explaining things indirectly—you can imagine why—because she makes it clear that the the ferryport people at both ends, Travemunde and Trelleborg, were rather surprised by this guy insisting that he’s just going to drive around Skåne in his big ugly car. She also makes it clear that Herr Klein has a knack for not hearing advice unless it’s telling him to do what he’s already decided he’s going to do, which does not come as a shock by this point. Then Herr Klein tells his wife to be quiet, because he has important questions about the village grid—he doesn’t want any unsustainable electrons going into his battery, you see!

“Our energy is very sustainable here, Herr Klein,” says Mikael.

“Ah, good—wind and solar?” asks Klein.

“Some rooftop solar, yes,” says Mikael. “There’s turbines inland, but the farmers use that to power their machinery. We have a little tidal barrage out beyond the harbour, but Östersjön doesn’t get regular tides like a real ocean, so we only get a little bit now and then.”

“So you buy what you need from the grid, then,” says Klein, and there’s a relaxation to his voice for the first time since he got out of the car, as if the language of buying and selling is one that he is comfortable in speaking, you know. “Yes,” says Mikael, “but very rarely. The grid’s balanced for what’s needed, so taking extra tends to cost a lot. We mostly find we can get by with the generation resources we have to hand, and if we can’t, we do without.”

“Admirable, admirable,” says Klein, as we approach the gym, which has the public charger sockets on the outside wall. “And how sensible, to put charging sockets on a building so central to the village.”

“More a matter of practicality, Herr Klein,” says Mikael, taking the charging cable. “After all, that’s where most of our extra generation comes from.”

“You charge your cars from the town gymnasium?”

“Well, our bikes, but yeah. Shame to let those calories go to waste, eh?” Mikael hands the cable back to Klein. “Looks like it should fit just fine. We can roll the car up here and get it plugged in after we’re done at the harbour. In the meantime, Malin at the lanthandel can help you call around the area and find somewhere to stay.”

“Somewhere to stay?! How long will it take to charge the car?”

Mikael asks Herr Klein some questions about battery capacity and trickle wattage, pokes at the little touchscreen on the gym wall by the sockets, frowns as he does the maths in his head.

“You’re in luck,” he says. “The weather’s going to hold, so the solar will make things much faster.”

“Excellent,” says Herr Klein.

“Yeah,” says Mikael, “you should have decent half-charge in there in no more than ten days.” As you can surely imagine, at this point Kalle’s cronies erupted in knee-slapping gales of laughter. This story is clearly a much-loved local tale, polished to perfection with time and telling, and Kalle delivered the punchline perfectly.

There is a coda, too, in which the ill-tempered Herr Klein appropriates a bike and disappears westward along the kustvägen, to arrange for a small ship to come to collect his stranded car. Meanwhile Frau Klein and the kids are set up with somewhere to stay, having been instructed to wait for Klein’s return; it’s implied that they later disappear off to the Slow Coast north of Simrishamn, though whether that’s to avoid Klein or search for him was not clear from this telling. The main take-away is that Klein never returns to collect the car, so it becomes the town mascot in the middle of the little square by the harbour.

Knowing you, dear Annika, I’m sure you can see even more gaping holes and inconsistencies in this story than I can. It is ludicrous—Herr Klein is played (with great gusto, I should add) as an unvarnished stereotype of the sort of German tourist that would descend upon Skåne back in the early years of the century, but somehow he makes it all the way to Abbekås in his ludicrous car without anyone making it clear to him how fast and deep the Swedish transition has already been by the mid 2030s? And the battery just happens to run out right here?

It is also exceptionally neat—and my old fieldwork instincts tell me that Kalle’s past as a builder and climate sceptic has a lot to do with his taking enthusiastic ownership of this story, a couple of decades after the events were supposed to have occurred.

Is it true, then? Almost certainly not, in the strictly factual sense of that question—and I dare say that a bit of research around the fading numberplate on the car in the square would quickly reveal a number of falsehoods. (For starters, the numberplate in question is clearly Danish rather than German—though it’s been that long since anyone in Abbekås saw a numberplate, I suppose they might be forgiven for not knowing.)

But as ethnographers, dearest Annika, you and I both know there are other sorts of truth—the truths we find, for instance, in stories told by people about how they came to terms with huge shifts in their sociotechnical culture. This is just such a story, don’t you think? A wonderful addition to my final book! Researching the car would spoil it completely, though I dare say on of the young researchers on the project will do it anyway.

I have to remind myself that the transition years are history to these youngsters, while to us, they’re merely the past—which isn’t quite the same thing. The older I get, the more important that distinction becomes, even as it becomes so much harder to keep track of…

Ah, well. Let the young people worry about history, I say! My past is more than enough for me at this stage of my life—not least because it has you in it, dearest Annika.

Write soon. I miss you. x

#

Source Scenario

Future 1 - Yabba-Dabba-Doo Economics Thriving in a Post-Resource World

Already in the mid-2020s, it became evident that most of our planet’s natural resources were about to be depleted. Southern Sweden was one of the first regions to realise this and prepare for what was to come.

In 2050, while the world faces the almost complete scarcity of resources, including fossil fuels, minerals, cheap labour, and clean air, soil and freshwater - Southern Sweden can be seen thriving, albeit within certain limits.

The democratically elected government of Southern Sweden, well-attuned to the society’s collective intelligence, led the work to create the foundation of a society that emphasises equality, circularity, locality, inclusivity and self-sufficiency. They applied careful planning, substantive debate, years of listening to the academics, to the activists and to the citizens, while paying less and less attention to corporations and lobbyists.

Today, wellbeing is the measurestock, instead of the economic growth, as we beckon a new era of “back to the basics” inspired by the 1960s animated sitcom, the Flintstones.

There’s been a significant infrastructural change towards local electricity production. This transition to decentralised energy generation promotes the self-sufficiency of communities and reduces reliance on external power sources. The decentralisation of electricity production is achieved through multiple different methods, such as utilising human physical activity at gyms. These activities promote physical fitness, encourage preventive health care, creativity in design, and community spirit while showcasing sustainable transportation alternatives.

Transportation is limited to eco-friendly modes such as sailboats, walking, cycling, swimming and the like. Roads and parking spaces are no longer just thoroughfares for vehicles but have been repurposed as multi-functional green spaces for biodiversity and community building activities.

Food waste is minimised through careful planning of cooking, and sustainable farming practices are embraced to support local food production. For example, food is only served in community food halls instead of individual households to save energy and minimise food waste. The vast and long coastline of Skåne was found to be of great benefit for the region. The sea and its resources, such as algae and seaweed, are used for food production, textiles and other essential materials.

When it comes to product development, circularity is a given. For every trashcan there was in 2024, there is now a repairperson. For every landfill, there is now a circularity centre which is seen as a great place to mine valuable resources.

Public spaces serve multiple purposes. Libraries offer both knowledge sharing, and warmth indoors during the colder seasons and cool spaces during the summer.

There is a general understanding by the people in Southern Sweden that all resources do not need to be readily available at all times to all people. This realisation is something that neighbouring regions are still coping with. Community comes before the individual. It is We & Us rather than I & Me - individual ownership of things is questioned and minimised.