Innovation is important but sometimes can be hard to understand, or for that matter describe. But if you put the world ‘social’ before it, it’s another thing altogether. With social innovation, we are suddenly talking about forming relationships between people and meeting needs that are very important to them. Here you can find huge value and enormous inspiration, both for me and for those living in Drottninghög.
Everything we do and have done here, all the projects and initiatives, start with the human perspective and the people who live and work in Drottninghög. The entire area is being transformed, and this means tearing down buildings and putting up new ones. But we’re not starting with that. A new rose garden, shared allotments, new barbeque areas, several projects that focus on culture and relationship building – we’ve done all this before the first building was demolished. I think that means something.
There is a long-term approach in the project that I hope we can learn from. Working with a timeframe of twenty or twenty-five years really allows for testing things, and then for expanding and anchoring these new elements in everyday life. That’s how I want H22 to work too.
When the project here began, we had a rule that everything that happens in the city will also happen in Drottninghög. Today it’s almost the opposite. A lot of what happens in Drottninghög takes flight and spreads to other parts of the city. I remember coming back from a holiday, in 2018 I think, and being met by five minibuses in the parking lot. I thought to myself, what have I missed now, what’s this? Soon I realised that the buses had been full of children and young people from other parts of Helsingborg who had come to see all the things in Drottninghög. Tourists from the same city! This wasn’t the case a few years ago!
