The old shipbuilding center of Göteborg is remaking itself as an alluring place to live or visit.

By NICHOLAS ADAMS

Unless you're on business or you're a parent cheerleader headed for the Gothia Cup, the world's premier grade-school soccer tournament, chances are good that the city of Göteborg isn't on your travel itinerary. The old shipbuilding center straddling the Göta River near its mouth on the west coast of Sweden has been suffering from a bad case of post-industrial depression. Changes in the global economy turned the skyline to a dark red stain of empty warehouses and stationary cranes as new deep-draft container ships left the waterfront to molder and ruin, not unlike the onetime state of waterfronts in Cleveland and Baltimore. Images of smashed shop windows on the streets and sidewalks that were broadcast during protests at last summer's European Union Summit didn't exactly buff the city's image.

A ferry service connects the river banks. (Nicholas Adams)

It's too bad, because Göteborg is undergoing a renaissance on a scale that deserves to be seen. The blight that infected its once-bustling piers and the rugged neighborhoods where dockhands lived has been arrested in imaginative ways. New museums and cultural institutions are going up, while housing of a unique late-19th- and early-20th-century design is being reclaimed for another hundred years of use. The dock area is active again, and all the talk is about the Internet and Göteborg's future role as a center for wireless technology. The city's population, which topped at 450,000 in 1970 before falling almost 10 percent over the next decade, has rebounded and continues to rise. When I told a Swedish friend that I was visiting Göteborg for the first time, he smiled, in his compatriots' understated way. "Göteborg," he said quietly, "is a very special place."

Göteborg is Sweden's second city, and yet it is, in some ways, the least Swedish of cities. Laid out on the south bank of the Göta by Dutch engineers starting in the early 17th century, the original city retains the classic elements of Holland: a spiky enceinte (an encircling fortification), wide-open squares, and canals that infuse slow-paced gentility into the commercial hustle. Alongside the Vallgrave canal, occupying the old earthen outwork that rings the settlement, lies the English-style garden of Trägårdsföreningen. Opened in 1842, it has a rose garden with several thousand species, a tropical-butterfly house, and fountains and sculpture that dot rolling lawns kept green by the region's abundant rainfall. Visitors cluster for lunch and coffee at cafés in late-19th-century painted wood cottages and tour the Palm House, an 1878 miniature of Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace from the Great Exhibition in London of 1851.

Nicholas Adams writes for several architecture magazines, here and abroad.

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