Why Stockholm is burning

The few media outlets even reporting on the riots in Stockholm describe the trouble as being in the "suburbs".  While technically correct, this leaves most readers in the dark as to what is really going on:

Instead, they were in high-density housing projects that Sweden built in an effort to promote transit ridership, which planners today would call “transit-oriented developments.” Most Swedes, however, refused to live in these projects, so they became home to Sweden’s second-class citizenry, namely immigrant and often Muslim workers.


American urban planners who want to follow Europe’s example of emphasizing multi-family housing and transit over single-family homes and automobiles should look closely at Sweden’s example. Though Sweden is often praised as an ideal social democracy, the riots reveal a dark underbelly, namely that the country has come to depend on immigrant workers who take second-class jobs and live in second-class housing and are forced to use second-class transportation.

They're the Swedish equivalent of the Paris banlieus, or of the old unlamented South Bronx projects.  The 20th Century fetish for central planning - the dehumanizing, soul crushing squashing of the individual by the collective - that's what's on fire.

Personally I'd be a lot more impressed by the intelligence of those who view themselves as our betters if they ever saw a planning failure that didn't lead directly to an instinct to do it again, only harder.  Who realize that while mass transit and mass housing may in fact be rational, people don't want them if they have a choice, and that the real solution doesn't lie in taking away all other choices.