No serious attempt has been made to establish adequate communications between the northern districts. Admittedly a tunnel under the Johannes district is suggested, but its capacity would have been meagre and it had no satisfactory link-up with the street network on the western side. New areas have been laid out by adding extensions generally wider to existing streets, but the width of the streets is everywhere quite modest. The creation of new crossing-streets has resulted in a somewhat unstructured network of large blocks; here, too, the system of through-roads does not appear to have received sufficient attention. Tree-lined streets and parks are mainly confined to the outer reaches of the city, and were to make hardly any real impact on conditions in the central districts. As in the Hobrecht plan for Berlin, a large section of the urban area is surrounded by a ring boulevard along the city border, as instructed by the governor himself. Market squares have been planned in several places. A number of starshaped ‘squares’ are also included in the plan, mainly located on the ring boulevard. To summarize: Rudberg and Wallström’s proposal was certainly made with the best intentions, and its details are in many cases well thoughtout, but it lacks the great radical vision required for any fundamental improvement in Stockholm’s urban environment.
During 1864 Rudberg and Wallström’s proposals were submitted successively by the governor to the newly established finance committee (drätselnämnden). This was a body under the city council, which had come into operation in 1863. Obviously the governor had expected that the municipal authorities’ handling of the issue would be mainly limited to allocating the necessary funds. But the finance committee was not prepared to approve the new plan just like that. Instead, in its turn, it appointed a special committee to examine the proposal. It must be left open whether the goal was primarily to have the plan assessed, or whether it was to demonstrate the new autonomy of the municipal government. However that may be, the work of this committee was dominated by Albert Lindhagen, permanent undersecretary of state (expeditionschef) and later member of the Supreme Court, who soon became its chairman. The outcome was that Rudberg and Wallström’s project was declared unusable. The Lindhagen Committee’s report took the form of a new proposal, presented in 1866 and published the following year16.
In its far-sightedness, its broad perspectives and its cogent presentation this proposal (figures 13.4 and 13.6) is a high-water mark in Stockholm’s planning history. We should not uncritically accept the Lindhagen Committee’s negative view of Rudberg and Wallström’s project, however, since this certainly provided an important point of departure for the work of the Lindhagen Committee and gave it several concrete ideas to work on.
The most striking element in the Lindhagen Committee’s proposal is a long 70– metre wide avenue across the whole of Norrmalm from Brunnsviken to Gustav Adolfs Torg, ‘a broad…artery for traffic, air and light.’17 The northern section of this grand thoroughfare, one of the most grandiose street projects of the nineteenth century, ran mainly over ground that had hitherto been developed either little or not at all, but its southern length was to cut not only through the Brunkeberg, a ridge stretching from north to south across the northern parts of the town, but also across the built-up area of central Norrmalm. Among the buildings which would have to be demolished was Adolf Fredrik’s church. To the east of this avenue a slightly narrower tree-lined street was planned, which would run straight as an arrow through the whole northern area of the city to the Berzelii Park. The east-west connection was catered for by a street which would run from a star-shaped place in the neighbourhood of the present Fridhemsplan, cutting diagonally through the street network in Kungsholmen to join up at Norrmalm with the pattern of the existing network, and opening up communications through the Brunkeberg, after which it would cut diagonally across Östermalm to another new star-shaped place, roughly the present Karlaplan. On the southern side of Norrmalm a broad passage has been opened through the existing urban structure from Berzelii Park through Kungsträdgården and along the length of Jakobsgatan to the present Tegelbacken. The main routes in the north are Karlbergsvägen and a street roughly on the site of the present Odengatan. Other thoroughfares are also included, as well as quays and roads along the embankments and a boulevard encircling the built-up area on the north and east sides of the town.
On Södermalm the existing main streets, Hornsgatan and Götgatan, were to be widened and a ring road was to encompass the main part of the district. In this way, and with the help of a ramp road or viaduct leading up to Södermalmstorg it was possible to solve the awkward problem of