Micro-home installation in Sweden highlights youth housing crisis
Riksbyggen and BBDO Nordics’ new campaign features three impossibly small homes, showing exactly the amount of space young Swedes can currently afford to buy in urban areas
In Sweden, as in many countries around the world, young people are currently facing a major uphill battle to buy their first homes, owing to extremely high prices in cities and strict down-payment rules. This issue has been widely debated in recent years, with articles and news reports delving into the situation; what is less common however, are visualisations that show the reality in a clear, tangible way.
Looking to combat this, and realising the need to go beyond simple graphs and statistics, Riksbyggen, one of Sweden’s largest housing developers, recently unveiled a campaign that transforms the numbers into a physical experience.
Created in collaboration with BBDO Nordics, Visning av verkligheten (Visualisation of reality) involved the construction of three full-scale homes based on the amount of space an average 25-year-old in Sweden can actually afford to buy.
Using the company’s new Square Metre Index, Riksbyggen determined that in Umeå, the average is 4.5 sqm; in Gothenburg it’s 3.1 sqm; and in Stockholm it’s a measly 1.9 sqm. For reference, the average size of a single bedroom in the UK is between 7-9 sqm – so, young people in Sweden can just about afford half of a single room (as long as they’re content with not living in the capital).
Taking these numbers, Riksbyggen joined forces with BBDO Nordics to design and construct three tiny homes that correlate with each finding. Each one was designed in a different style, referencing three distinct eras of Swedish architecture, including turn-of-the-century, functionalist and contemporary. Inside the micro-homes are beds, chairs, tables and cooking appliances, all squeezed together in a claustrophobic arrangement.
As part of the campaign, Riksbyggen has also released a short video highlighting the absurdity of the situation. The film shows three young occupants ‘relaxing’ in their homes, as they are forced to put their feet up on the wall to lie on the bed, heat up food in a microwave next to a toilet, and listen to music just inside the front door.
The cute yet unimaginably cramped houses are set to go on tour around Sweden, allowing visitors to step inside and experience for themselves the sad reality of the country’s housing market.