by After 19 years of commuting to Denmark from Sweden, Helen Sjögren is so used to crossing the bridge that it is identified more as Scandinavian than Swedish. The researcher of a Danish pharmaceutical company lives with her three children in the Swedish University of Lund, but has got used to Danish work practices, and the idea of working in Sweden is now difficult to imagine.
“Because I am Swedish, colleagues would expect to behave like a Sweden,” she said, referring to her reputation to look for consensus. “So I would be considered rude – too directly to fit in Sweden.”
Danes, as she found, are more open. “I like the Danish mentality and the way of being. It fits me much better.”
“I like the Danish mentality and the way of being. It fits me much better.” At work, you and your colleagues speak slightly adapted versions of Swedish and Danish so that everyone can understand each other. One of their few concerns is that their taxes go to Copenhagen rather than their own community, where their children went to school and where they use health services.
In the quarter of a century since its opening on July 1, 2000, the bridge, which is known as Øresundsbroen or Öresundsbron, depending on whether they are on the Danish or Swedish side of the same name, not only opened Copenhagen’s huge labor market to use the statements and also the identity that exploits the statements and the identity. Identity that use it, but have changed, but the statements and identity that use it. The 9.9 -mile railway and the road connection between Copenhagen and Malmö (to an 8 km long bridge, 4 km tunnels and 4 km artificial island) have also changed the worldwide perception of the region.
But the trajectory of the two ends of the bridge was a story of two halves. Copenhagen has risen to international super status and has a must to tourist destination, global fashion and design guides, who organizes the largest airport in the Nordicers and is home to the home of the manufacturer of Ozempic, Novo Nordisk. Thanks to the weak Swedish Krona, it has become a magnet for Swedish workers who brings 2 billion DKK (230 million GBP) into tax revenue per year. Last year, 105,000 daily trips were made by car, train or boat above the street, but most of the commuter traffic drives towards Denmark.
Malmö has not thrived to the same extent. Although the beloved fictional detective Saga Norén des Hit -Scandi -Krimi -Dramas The Bridge, who catapulted the bridge with unsolved murders, ships and tense dark drives throughout Danish Capital on the international fame. This may best be recorded by the decision by politicians to name the area around the bridge over the southern Sweden and the eastern Denmark “Greater Copenhagen”.
Of the 21,585 people who came across the bridge regularly to work in the last quarter of last year, 96% people who live in Sweden were an independent Swedish knowledge center, according to the Øresund. By 2030, Greater Copenhagen, who are operated by representatives of the included Swedish and Danish regions, will be targeting a total of 30,000.
“The number of commuters has started to have increased again,” said Johan Wessman, managing director and editor -in -chief of the Øresund Institute. “Partly because the lack of work in Denmark increases, and partly because the Swedish crowna makes it profitable to work in Denmark and to live and shop in Sweden.” Although it was not impossible to commute to commute in front of the bridge-it was much time-consuming and difficult. In 1999, one year before the opening of the bridge, a total of 2,788 people were converted.
When the train transported Sjögren towards Sweden and the water of the street came into view, she said that without the bridge the life, as she knew it was impossible. “It would never have worked because it would have taken as much longer as if I haven’t held my life together.”
Although there is border controls – each train lasts six to seven minutes at Hyllie station, the first stop that comes from Denmark to Sweden – she said she didn’t think she was going to Copenhagen to go to another country. “For us who live here, the border is not a big deal,” she said.
But Anders Linde-Laursen, professor at Malmö University, studies identity and studied with a focus on the Øresund region, said that the users of the bridge are “constantly reminiscent that they exceed an international border”. This became very clear when the bridge was temporarily closed in 2015 during the refugee crisis when the Swedish government said that it needed a “break” of asylum seekers, which led to the introduction of travelers who had to carry an ID card. And in 2020 during pandemic when the bridge was closed again. “The border resigned in the region and it became very clear to everyone that there were Danes and Sweden that were separated by them [water]And that no bridge would change that. “
In the offices of the Danish energy agency in the center of Copenhagen, Ture Ertmann is one of the 19,500 people born in Danes who live in Skåne, the most Swedish southernmost district. After leaving his youngest in the preschool in Malmö, he climbs to Denmark by train and arrives at around 8.30 a.m. a work – a routine that he has been pursuing for 13 years. His wife and two other children work and go to school in Malmö and at home Swedish is her main language. “Everything is in Malmö,” said Ertmann, who founded the Facebook commuter group Broenlive. “It’s just me, that’s the strange thing that works here and has a Danish passport.”
They originally decided to move after a sudden change in the immigration rules in Denmark that his wife, who is a nurse from the Philippines, would have problems with their visa. So they married, moved to Sweden and founded a family there. She now works in the Malmö Hospital and has a Swedish citizenship.
Cross -border life is not without problems. Since the two governments are not integrated in relation to the administration, paper stuff can be difficult – especially with regard to property and tax. The demand for the train is such that it is usually only at peak times and the services are often delayed.
About 9,600 Danes now have summer houses in Sweden compared to 4,400 in 2000, and another 11,330 Swedish summer houses have German owners – many of whom use the bridge to get there. Danske Torpare, a paid membership organization that helps Danish to navigate the administrative difficulties, to buy houses in Sweden, said the price difference – it was almost half of the price to buy a summer house in Sweden than in Denmark – and the opportunity to live in nature in nature.
Sweden’s ambassador to Denmark, Hans Wallmark, said that he was convinced that the advantages of the bridge had run in both directions, but added: “You cannot escape from the fact that Copenhagen is a capital, so she has this attraction.” Rating on the Life Science Cluster, known as Medicon Valley, which mainly focuses on the Danish side, but is increasingly spreading to the Swedish side, he said that Danish successes such as Novo Nordisk also had a positive influence on Sweden. The foundation of the European Source of Spallation (ESS) in Lund, a research institution that is still under construction with a data center in Copenhagen, was another example of a cross-bridge success story, said Wallmark.
In the next 25 years, according to predicted, he would establish even more connection and concentrate on the region – especially after the Fehmarnbelt -Tunnel opened in 2029 and the Danish city of Rødbyhavn connected with Puttgarden in Germany under the Baltic Sea. “Then we may not only talk about Malmö, Copenhagen or Skåne, but also about Northern Germany,” he said in his residence in Copenhagen. “Bridges, connections lead to increased integration and increased prosperity.”
But there are many in Malmö who do not use the bridge – either because it is unaffordable (510dkk or £ 58.25 for the car control component and 160 seconds or £ 12.31 for a single training ticket from Malmö to Copenhagen) or because of the train delay.
“It is too expensive to pass,” said a man who rests a man from cycling in Malmö. He recently waited five hours on midsummer evening to get a train over the bridge. “It doesn’t work. It’s so often [that the train gets delayed]. You can forget to commute to Copenhagen – unless you have your own boat. “
