
The City of the Future: Malmö
Malmö was once a shipbuilding and manufacturing city, its economy built around the Kockums shipyard and heavy industry that collapsed in the late twentieth century. This episode of the Habitats of the World series follows how Sweden's third-largest city rebuilt itself into a showcase for sustainable urban living, with wind turbines, energy-efficient housing developments, and bike-first street design replacing the old industrial footprint. Cameras move through the Western Harbour district, once a derelict industrial site and now a neighborhood built on renewable energy and low-carbon construction, and take in the canals, parks, and waterfront that anchor the city's public life. Local residents, planners, and officials describe the choices behind the transformation and what daily life looks like inside it. Rather than treating Malmö as a finished utopia, the film frames it as an ongoing experiment, tracking what worked, what has been harder to solve, and what other cities trying similar transitions might take from the result. It is a compact, footage-driven portrait of one city's answer to industrial decline.