Sunday Paper

Issue 01

SUNDAY PAPER A Magazine For Varied Interests £6.00

1 Megacities: Lagos & Tokyo - Ai Wei Wei Love and Lust in LA - Night Riders Dark Lands: Scandinavia

Winter

SUNDAY PAPER

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Hi! Welcome to the first issue of Sunday Paper magazine.

Though a British publication by name and base the magazine is proud of its outwards look on the world. Each month we hope to grace these pages with execusite articles from our contributors from across the world.

Contributor Credits: Martin Roemers Michael Prodger Navad Baraty George Packer Will Hoffman Julius Metoye Michael Booth

The magazine covers the subjects of travel and culture, food and style. And everything of interest.

We hope you find wonder and inspiration in these pages as we have hand picked select content from 4 different continents from Lagos to LA. This is just a sampler issue for you to get a taste of what is to come for the following issues.

Please take a seat and read on.

@sundaypaper sundaypaper.com

Editor

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Contents

Megacities - Page 4 We analyse one of the biggest issues for now and the future the rise of the worlds megacities. Looking at Lagos and Tokyo as examples Ai Wei Wei - Page 14 From criminal to art-world superstar we meet Chinese artist before his first major British exhibition

Michael Wolff Architecture of Density 2014. Megacities - Page 4

Love and Lust in LA - Page 20 Going under the covers in the search for real sex and intimacy Night Riders - Page 22

Scandinavia - Page 26

How does all-night travel work in other cities around the world? We hop in Berlin, Barcelona and New York

The grim truth behind the 'Scandinavian Miracle'. And the responses by thier people.

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MEGA CITIES 4

Lagos

/

Tokyo

The term megacity is now common but it hasn't always been that way. In 2010 the world could count 27 megacities; but by 2020 it'll be closer to 40. Megacities are defined by the sheer size of their poupulation. It is less well-known cities, particularly in south and east Asia, that will see the biggest growth.

Optimists see a new network of powerful, stable and prosperous city states, each bigger than many small countries, where the benefits of urban living, the relativeease of delivering basic services compared to rural zones and new civic identities combine to raise living standards for billions. Pessimists see the opposite: a dystopic future where huge numbers of people fight over scarce resources in sprawling, divided, anarchic "non-communities" ravaged by disease and violence. We look at the best and worse of the megacities

Megacity = A city with over 10m citizens

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L

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Africa’s biggest city, and the fastest-growing metropolis in the world, Lagos is by turns intimidating and compelling.

Most Westerners are simply terrified of it, believing they won’t make it beyond the notorious Murtala Muhammed Airport.

For the 6,000 newcomers thought to arrive every day from across the West Africa region, the city holds the promise of something more than surviving: the possibility of riches for people who have little or no choice. But few have any conception how hard that will be.

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feet deep. All day and night, residents line up at the boreholes to pay five cents and fill their plastic buckets with contaminated water, which some of them drink anyway. Isale Eko is the oldest and densest part of Lagos Island.

Every square foot is claimed by someone—for selling, for washing, even for sleeping— and there is almost no privacy. Many residents sleep outdoors.

A young man sitting in an alley pointed to some concrete ledges three feet above a gutter.

“These are beds,” he said. In the newer slums on the mainland, such as Mushin, rectangular concreteblock houses squeeze seven or eight people into a single, mosquitoinfested room—in bunks or on the floor—along a narrow corridor of opposing chambers.

This arrangement is known as “face me I face you.”

One compound can contain eighty people.

In Mushin, Muslim Hausas from the north of Nigeria coexist uneasily with mostly Christian Yorubas from the south. Armed gangs represent the interests of both groups. On the night of Febru-ary 2, 2002, a witness told me, a Hausa youth saw a Yoruba youth squatting over a gutter on the street and demanded, “Why are you shitting there?” In a city where only 0.4 per cent of the

dn al sI n

aC

ni T

Iwa ya

In the absence of piped water, wealthier residents of the waterfront slum at the end of the bridge, called Isale Eko, pay private contractors to sink boreholes sixty

8

OF

LAGOS

Yaba

he Third Mainland Bridge is a looping ribbon of concrete that connects Lagos Island to the continent of Africa. It was built in the nineteen-seventies, part of a vast network of bridges, cloverleafs, and expressways intended to transform the districts and islands of this Nigerian city—then comprising three million people—into an efficient modern metropolis. As the bridge snakes over sunken piers just above the waters of Lagos Lagoon, it passes a floating slum: thousands of wooden houses, perched on stilts a few feet above their own bobbing refuse, with rust-colored iron roofs wreathed in the haze from thousands of cooking fires. Fishermen and market women paddle dugout canoes on water as black and viscous as an oil slick.

The bridge then passes the sawmill district, where rain-forest logs—sent across from the far shore, thirty miles to the east—form a floating mass by the piers. Smoldering hills of sawdust landfill send white smoke across the bridge, which mixes with diesel exhaust from the traffic. Beyond the sawmills, the old waterfront markets, the fishermen’s shanties, the blackened façades of high-rise housing projects, and the half-abandoned skyscrapers of downtown Lagos Island loom under a low, dirty sky. Around the city, garbage dumps steam with the combustion of natural gases, and auto yards glow with fires from fuel spills. All of Lagos seems to be burning.

The bridge descends into Lagos Island and a pandemonium of venders’ stalls crammed with spare parts, locks, hard hats, chains, screws, charcoal, detergent, and DVDs. On a recent afternoon, car horns, shouting voices, and radio music mingled with the snarling engines of motorcycle taxis stalled in traffic and the roar of an air compressor in an oily t i r e repair yard. Two months e a r l i e r , a huge cast-iron water main suspended beneath the bridge had broken free of its rusted clip, crushing a vacant scrap market below and cutting off clean water from tens of thousands of the fifteen million people who now live in Lagos.

“And what particularly amazes me is how the kinds of infrastructure of modernity in the city trigger off all sorts of unpredictable improvised conditions, so that there is a kind of mutual dependency that I’ve never seen anywhere else.” With its massive traffic jams creating instant markets on roads and highways, Lagos is not “a kind of backward situation,” Koolhaas said, but, rather, “an announcement of the future.”

T

CHAOS

inhabitants have a toilet connected to a sewer system, it was more of a provocation than a serious question.

T h e incident that night led to a brawl.

Almost immediately, the surrounding compounds emptied out, and the streets filled with Yorubas and Hausas armed with machetes and guns. The fighting lasted four days and was ended only by the military occupation of Mushin. By then, more than a hundred residents had been killed, thousands had fled the area, and hundreds of houses had burned down.

Newcomers to the city are not greeted with the words “Welcome to Lagos.” They are told, “This is Lagos”—an ominous statement of fact.

Olisa Izeobi, a worker in one of the sawmills along the lagoon, said, “We understand this as ‘Nobody will care for you, and you have to struggle to survive.’ ” It is the singular truth awaiting the six hundred thousand people who pour into Lagos from West Africa every year.

Their lungs will burn with smoke and exhaust; their eyes will sting; their skin will turn charcoal gray. And hardly any of them will ever leave.

Immigrants come to Lagos with the thinnest margin of support, dependent on a local relative or contact whose assistance usually lasts less than twenty-four hours. A girl from the Ibo country, in the southeast, said that she had been told by a woman in her home town that she would get restaurant work in Lagos.

Upon arrival, she discovered that she owed the woman more than two hundred dollars for transport and that the restaurant job didn’t exist. The girl, her hair combed straight back and her soft face fixed in a faraway stare, told me that she was eighteen, but she looked fifteen. She is now a prostitute in a small hotel called Happiness. Working seven nights a week, with each customer spending three and a half dollars and staying five minutes, she had paid off her debt after seven months. She has no friends except the other girls in the hotel. In her room, on the third floor, the words “I am covered by the blood of Jesus. Amen” are chalked on a wall three times.

THE

A woman named Safrat Yinusa left behind her husband and two of her children in Ilorin, north of the city, and found work in one of Lagos’s huge markets as a porter, carrying loads of produce on her head. She was nursing a baby boy, whom she carried as she worked. She paid twenty cents a night for sleeping space on the floor of a room with forty other women porters. In two months, she had saved less than four dollars. Considering that the price of rice in Lagos is thirty-three cents per pound, it is hard to understand how people like Yinusa stay alive. The paradox has been called the “wage puzzle.”

When Michael Chinedu, an Ibo, arrived in Lagos, he knew no one. On his first day, he saw a man smoking marijuana—in Lagos, it’s called India hemp—and, being a smoker as well, introduced himself. On this slim connection, Chinedu asked the man if he knew of any

DECODING

jobs, and he was taken to the sawmill, where he began at once, working long days amid the scream of the ripsaw and burning clouds of sawdust, sleeping outside at night on a stack of hardwood planks. After three months, he had saved enough for a room. “If you sit down, you will die of hunger,” he said. The hustle never stops in Lagos. Informal transactions make up at least sixty per cent of economic activity; at stoplights and on highways, crowds of boys as young as eight hawk everything from cell phones to fire extinguishers. Begging is rare. In many African cities, there is an oppressive atmosphere of people lying about in the middle of the day, of idleness sinking into despair. In Lagos, everyone is a striver. I once saw a woman navigating across several lanes of traffic with her small boy in tow, and the expression on her face was one I came to think of as typically Lagosian: a look hard, closed, and unsmiling, yet quick and shrewd, taking in everything, ready to ward off an obstacle or seize a chance.In 1950, fewer than three hundred thousand people lived in Lagos.

become the focus of intense scholarly interest, in books such as Mike Davis’s “Planet of Slums,” Suketu Mehta’s “Maximum City,” and Robert Neuwirth’s “Shadow Cities.” Neuwirth, having lived for two years in slum neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi, and other cities, came to see the world’s urban squatters as pioneers and patriots, creating solid communities without official approval from the state or the market.

“Today, the world’s squatters are demonstrating a new way forward in the fight to create a more equitable globe,” he wrote. What squatters need most of all, he argued, is the right to stay where they are: “Without any laws to support them, they are making their improper, illegal communities grow and prosper.” Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and a business strategist based in Marin County, California, goes even further. “Squatter cities are vibrant,” he writes in a recent article on megacities. “Each narrow street is one long bustling market.” He sees in the explosive growth of “aspirational shantytowns” a cure for Third World poverty and an extraordinary profit-making opportunity.

“How does all this relate to businesspeople in the developed world?” Brand asks. “One-fourth of humanity trying new things in new cities is a lot of potential customers, collaborators, and competitors.” In the dirty gray light of Lagos, however, Neuwirth’s portrait of heroic builders of the cities of tomorrow seems a bit romantic, and Brand’s vision of a global city of interconnected entrepreneurs seems perverse. The vibrancy of the squatters in Lagos is the furious activity of people who live in a globalized economy and have no safety net and virtually no hope of moving upward.

Around a billion people—almost half of the developing world’s urban population— live in slums. The United Nations Human Settlements Program, in a 2003 report titled “The Challenge of the Slums,” declared, “The urban poor are trapped in an informal and ‘illegal’ world—in slums that are not reflected on maps, where waste is not collected, where taxes are not paid, and where public services are not provided. Officially, they do not exist.”

According to the report, “Over the course of the next two decades, the global urban population

Megacities

“Come Christmas, everybody in Lagos—the successful and the unsuccessful—packs their bags and goes off to the rural areas to show off what they have achieved,”

will double, from 2.5 to 5 billion. Almost all of this increase will be in developing countries.” In 2000, the United Nations established the Millennium Development Goals. One of them is to improve the lives of a hundred million slum dwellers by 2020, in terms of shelter, water, sewers, jobs, and governance. This will require enormous expenditures of money and effort, but even if the goal is achieved nearly a quarter of the world’s population—more than two billion people—will still be living in conditions like those in Lagos.

To some Western intellectuals, La-gos has become the archetype of the megacity—perhaps because its growth has been so explosive, and perhaps because its cityscape has become so apocalyptic.

It has attracted the attention of leading writers and artists, who have mounted international exhibitions in London and Berlin. All this interest has somehow transformed Lagos into a hip icon of

A P A P A

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the latest global trends, the much studied megalopolis of the future, like London and Paris in the nineteenth century or New York and Tokyo in the twentieth. For several years, the Dutch architect and urban theorist Rem Koolhaas has been working with his students at the Harvard Graduate S c h o o l of Design on a project to study the future of cities; he has gone to Lagos four times and produced several articles as well as a book to be published early next year, “Lagos: How It Works.” Koolhaas once described Lagos to an interviewer as a protean organism that creatively defies constrictive Western ideas of urban order. “What is now fascinating is how, with some level of self-organization, there is a strange combination of extreme underdevelopment and

Koso fe

Lekki

In the second half of the twentieth century, the city grew at a rate of more than six per cent annually. It is currently the sixth-largest city in the world, and it is growing faster than any of the world’s other megacities (the term used by the United Nations Center for Human Settlements for “urban agglomerations” with more than ten million people). By 2015, it is projected, Lagos will rank third, behind Tokyo and Bombay, with twenty-three million inhabitants.

When I first went to Lagos, in 1983, it already had a fearsome reputation among Westerners and Africans alike. Many potential visitors were kept away simply by the prospect of getting through the airport, with its official shakedowns and swarming touts. Once you made it into the city, a gantlet of armed robbers, con men, corrupt policemen, and homi-cidal bus drivers awaited you.

Recently, Lagos has begun to acquire a new image. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the Third World’s megacities have

Tokyo On a satellite image of the Earth at night, there is no brighter spot. Greater Tokyo, home to an astonishing 35 million people, is by far the biggest urban area on the planet. The most amazing thing about it, say its many fans, is that it works. Although Tokyo dwarfs the other top megacities of Mumbai, Mexico City, Sao Paulo and New York, it has less air pollution, noise, traffic jams, litter or crime, lots of green space . Tokyo is the megacity that works and this is how.

東京都 11

Megacities

A

merican writer Donald Richie, who first came to Tokyo in 1947 and recently published the coffee table book "Tokyo Megacity", has dubbed Japan's massive capital and primary city the "livable megalopolis". Many visitors marvel at the politeness and civility that, along with the nation's wealth, have helped Tokyo avoid the pitfalls of other big cities that have become polluted, noisy and dangerous urban nightmares. Amid the neon-lit street canyons, thoroughfares for millions every day, small shrines and quaint neighbourhoods survive as oases of tranquility, largely shielded from blights such as graffiti and vandalism.

Writing for the Los Angeles Times, a correspondent recently celebrated the ballet-like choreography of up to 2,500 people moving across Shibuya's massive "scramble crossing" every time the pedestrian lights turn green. In the fashion centre, and elsewhere in the pulsating megacity, "despite so much humanity inhabiting such a confined space, there's rarely a collision, sharp elbow, shoulder-brush or unkind word," wrote the correspondent, John M. Glionna.

On Tokyo's noodle bowl of subways, a rapid and efficient system with a smartcard pay system, commuters respect rules of courtesy, switch their mobile phones to silent and take their rubbish home to recycle it. Streets are rarely choked with cars because most city-dwellers don't have one, in part because they would have to own or rent a permanent parking space for it, in part because buses, trains or bicycles are viable alternatives. "despite

so much humanity inhabiting such a confined space, there's rarely a collision, sharp elbow, shoulder-brush or unkind word,"

Despite its best-in-class sense of order, Tokyo also has a buzz and a pulse, with cutting-edge and quirky youth fashion, design, architecture and cultural offerings that keep setting trends in Asia and beyond. Even France's Michelin Guide has crowned Tokyo as the world's culinary capital, awarding it the highest number of stars, more than Paris. Tokyo may have had its heyday when Japan was Asia's economic top dog in the 1980s and early 90s, but much of the look has survived - as have the famously astronomical prices that keep scaring off many would-be visitors. Japan's capital, where a watermelon can famously cost $20 or more, was the world's most expensive city for expatriates in 2010 with the exception of exorbitant Luanda in oil-rich Angola, according to consultancy Mercer. On Mercer's Quality of Living Survey, Tokyo was number two in Asia after the city-state of Singapore - but only number 40 worldwide, beaten mostly by smaller European and American cities, from Vienna to Vancouver.

However, trendy London-based current affairs, lifestyle and design magazine Monocle begs to differ - last week it ranked post-March 11 disaster Tokyo as the ninth most livable city in the world , and a few years ago it placed it at number three. "You just look at Tokyo and think it shouldn't work with so many people living together, but it does," said

the magazine's Asia bureau chief Fiona Wilson. "It would be a problem everywhere else.

"It's not just the great trains. It goes beyond the functionality. It's the service, the food, the restaurants, the shopping. It's all great." Another fan and Tokyoite, Colin Liddell, who writes for city magazine Metropolis, said the city works because of the "texture of Japanese culture", including a tendency to seek harmony not conflict. "Ideas that would be seen as antithetical in the West can peacefully coexist in Japan," he said. "Someone in a mink coat may have no problems getting along with radical vegans and animal rights activists. "It's just a different intellectual ecosystem and concept of each other that magically defuses the conflicts we find unavoidable in the west."

Of course, not everyone loves Tokyo.

For some the endless city brings a sense of alienation and loneliness, captured, albeit from a foreigner's perspective, as the backdrop to the Sofia Coppola movie "Lost in Translation". Many abhor the over-the-horizon sprawl that spreads across the Kanto plain and its often drab "Legoland"-style residential architecture. Then there are the rivers and canals, including one at Tokyo's historic centre at Nihonbashi, that have been concreted and roofed by expressways. There is a good reason for the drabness of much of Tokyo. Over the past century, much of the city has been destroyed twice - once in the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and again in the 1944-45 firebombings.

The March 11 earthquake and tsunami catastrophe that devastated northeast Japan once more badly rattled Tokyo, forcing hundreds of thousands to spend the night at work or walk home when the trains stopped.

The disaster, which caused several deaths, damaged buildings, emptied convenience stores and led to power outtages in Tokyo, also served as a reminder that the spectre of another "Big One" looms over the city.

This summer will be steamier than most for Tokyo's residents amid a power saving campaign that will see companies cut back on air-conditioning. Love it or hate it, almost everyone marvels at the scale of Tokyo.If it were a country, it would rank at about number 35 in population terms. At the heart of it all is the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, which governs Tokyo proper with 13 million people from a skyscraper-scale town hall with a annual budget that, according to the Japan Times, equals Saudi Arabia's.

With over half the world's population now living in cities, Tokyo believes it has lessons for a crowded planet. Last year Tokyo launched Asia's first carbon trading initiative, and the city government has pledged to cut Tokyo's greenhouse emissions by 25 percent by 2020 from 2000 levels. Under a 10-year plan, Tokyo aims to create 1,000 hectares of new green area and plant one million roadside trees, improve air quality and aggressively push solar energy and hybrid and electric cars. Many cities in Asia have little ability to tax their inhabitants or to

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Tokyo

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で ト く 上 面 の そ て で メ ウ の 星 汚 犯 ン 持

像 ッ 驚 球 市 て 、 っ と 、 パ 他 矮 大 や ミ を

星 ポ 、 地 都 い は 言 こ イ ン の を 、 み ハ ム

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球 る 。 家 最 れ き ァ 作 ム ィ ヨ シ 少 通 多 シ 。

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の い ま 人 か 。 く の が 京 シ ュ メ れ 、 間 交 ま

夜 な り 万 る す 驚 く れ 東 コ ニ プ そ 音 空 共 い

Tokyo believes it has lessons for a crowded planet. charge them for water or electricity, let alone to provide the sewerage, roads and public transport that might improve life. We still think in terms of the nation state. But the world’s people have moved to cities, many of them administratively powerless.

Clearly, there are huge problems associated with living an ever-more urban existence, not least the environmental impact. A middle-class Shanghainese consumes far more resources and generates far more greenhouse gases than a farmer in Anhui province. Yet, as Glaeser argues forcefully in Triumph of the City, cities are at the apex of human endeavour. High-density cities are creative, thrilling and less environmentally destructive than sprawling car-based suburbs typical of America. Cities are passports from

poverty. They attract poor people, rather than creating them. They are where humans are at their most artistically and technologically creative.

Whether we like it or not, it is no longer possible to keep the bulk of humanity down on the farm. By 2050, three-quarters of the world’s population will be urban. That means more cities – and more megacities. “These megacities are a big part of humanity’s future and the prospect should be both exhilarating and terrifying,” says Glaeser. The examples of Tokyo, Seoul and Shanghai show that megacities don’t have to be monstrosities. For many of us, the megacity is our fate. The goal of humanity should be to manage that fate, not succumb to it.

Tokyo is the megacity that works for now, anyway.

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Ai Wei Wei

from criminal to art world superstar 15

Ai Wei Wei

F

or a man who in 2011 spent 81 days incarcerated without charge at the pleasure of the government of the People’s Republic of China, Ai Weiwei’s choice of Berlin studio is a curious one. Rather than an airy white room full of light, he has gone for the opposite: an extraordinary maze of underground cellars that were once the cooling warehouses for the Pfefferberg brewery. This cavernous labyrinth of huge, bare, brick-vaulted spaces serves as studio, store rooms, refectory and creative hub for Ai and his team, and in its Carthusian calm resembles a subterranean monastery. The place exudes a feeling of security but not necessarily of freedom.

Berlin is Ai’s European base both for its geographical location and because his partner and six-year-old son live there. On his release from jail four years ago the authorities withheld his passport; it was returned to him only in July and Berlin was his first destination as a free man. On his arrival, the city greeted him as artist-activist royalty with a red-carpet welcome by the mayor and a teaching post at the University of the Arts. Berlin is also the place where many of the works that will be appearing at the Royal Academy’s big autumn show, Ai’s first major exhibition in Britain, were made. Like many successful artists, he operates a version of the traditional atelier system, with a crowd of assistants and fabricators producing his work. In this instance, although many of the pieces were conceived in his studio in China they just happen to have emerged some 6,000 miles away in the middle of Europe, courtesy of email, Skype and Twitter (Ai is an addict: in one year and a half period he once posted 60,000 tweets).

There is nothing at ground level outside the studio to indicate that what lies beneath is the realm of such a celebrated figure – celebrated, it must be said, as much, if not more, for his human rights stance as for his art.

One of the aims of the RA exhibition is to show what it is Ai actually makes. At the moment he is best known for his 2010-11 Sunflower Seeds installation at Tate Modern and the Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing, for which he was artistic consultant to the architectural team of Herzog & de Meuron. Beyond that, most people would, one suspects, struggle to name an Ai work.

After descending a series of staircases and traversing numerous echoing spaces, I find the artist in a long room lit by a light well, sitting like a Buddha and contemplating a cup of tea. For a man who has caused such a rumpus he appears a figure of immaculate calm; bearded and T-shirted, he is a media veteran who measures his words but neverthe less laughs easily.

I ask him first if the RA show would be very different had he been able to work in Berlin earlier. “I selected the works years ago,” he responds. “If I had a chance to choose them now I would still choose the same works.” Going to London, though, will give him the opportunity to oversee the final stages of the display and also, to his slight dismay, take part in the razzmatazz of the opening. “The handshaking and the champagne are not what I’m very good at, and if

I have a chance to avoid them … because of the Chinese government I’ve had over 100 shows that I haven’t been able to attend over the past 10 years.”

The exhibition will focus on work from the past decade because, he says, “so many things have happened – artistic and social and political. I have made works relating to my own experience, they reflect the place I have in China. I am most identified with struggle – physical or internal.” In China he is an elephant in the room: his name is not supposed to be mentioned, he is under constant surveillance yet people know exactly who he is.

Ai’s struggles with authority have a long provenance. His father, a poet, was exiled by Mao to the margins of the Gobi desert during the Cultural Revolution and the family grew up in extreme poverty. Ai’s father was made to clean the public lavatories, the family was ostracised and, at one point, lived in a hole dug in the ground where the young Ai learned to make bricks from the earth (a history that makes the Berlin cellars less surprising, perhaps). Although Ai senior was later rehabilitated, the experience left his son with deeply equivocal feelings about the Chinese state.

Although Ai had been a long-term critic of the authorities, his own problems escalated with the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 during which innumerable schools collapsed, killing thousands of students. The government tried to suppress the scale of the disaster, not least because so many of the schools were, as a result of widespread corruption, jerry-built (they were nicknamed “tofu-dregs schools”).

Ai’s response was to create a frieze composed of 9,000 children’s backpacks (called, after one mother’s memorial words to her child, She lived happily in this world for seven years), and another piece, Straight, comprising hundreds of steel reinforcing bars collected from the rubble. He also published the names of 5,000 of the dead schoolchildren.

In the succeeding train of events the government shut down his blog, he was beaten so severely that he was hospitalised for a head wound (a cerebral haemorrhage), his studio in Shanghai was demolished for supposedly being built without the necessary permits, and he was imprisoned and investigated on charges of pornography, bigamy, tax avoidance and foreign currency irregularities.

He has not, however, been convicted of any crime.

I told the police: 'Without you, I would never have become so noticeable as an artist' It was these legal proceedings that lay behind the UK Home Office’s initial refusal to grant Ai a British visa, on the grounds that he hadn’t declared his non-existent criminal convictions. The decision caused an uproar and was quickly overturned by Theresa May. Did Ai fear that the refusal stemmed from the British government’s desire not to upset the Chinese? “It was bureaucracy certainly,” he says, weighing his words, “but it reflects, perhaps, certain attitudes of the government … When I was refused, the feeling was quite sensational because I had just opened a door” – his Chinese passport had been returned – “and then there was another door. But it was solved so quickly.

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From criminal to art-world superstar I admire the British public, the media and the government – that’s the benefit of a democratic society, a longestablished civic society: everything can be solved.”

He laughs when I ask if his struggles have made him a better artist, but does acknowledge that they have changed him in a different way. “The police asked, very sincerely: ‘Do we make you very famous in the world?’ It is hard for them to ask this sort of question. I answered: ‘Yes. Five years ago when I did Sunflower Seeds, if I walk in a London street nobody knows who Ai Weiwei is. Today, every day, people jump off their bicycles, little kids ask are you Ai Weiwei? I have become some sort of myth.’ So I told the police: ‘Without you, I would never have become so noticeable as an artist.’ ” The finishing touches are put to Ai Weiwei's 'Forever', by the Gherkin building, as part of the City of London's "Sculpture in the City" programme.

The finishing touches are put to Ai Weiwei’s ‘Forever’, by the Gherkin building, as part of the City of London’s ‘Sculpture in the City 2015’ programme. Fame, however, has been a shock: “For the past four and a half years, after my detention, I couldn’t see it, I only heard that it was a phenomenon.” Phenomenon is right: he was named the most powerful person in the art world by Art Review; when

angles. Visitors to the RA will pass through a courtyard containing a forest of seven metre-tall trees, each constructed from the limbs of numerous other dead trees – a £100,000 project funded by crowdsourcing. Then there is his photography and architecture too. Ai Weiwei and the Han vase. “China itself is a sort of readymade,” Ai says; “Its history, its current struggle, its painful struggle – I make works relating to that.” Is he then a Chinese artist or a global one? “I am a global artist,” he responds, “but with Chinese characteristics – that’s what communists always say: we should build ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. The kind of ideology I identify with, though, is modernism.”

Modernism for Ai is not the historical movement of Duchamp, the Cubists, Mondrian, Le Corbusier et al but an ongoing project. “We are the fortunate children of the past,” he says, but also “new humans, we are created by the new technology and the new possibilities. And a new language of form, sensitivity, emotions is needed to cope with our self-consciousness and identities.”

That new language will not involve, as it once did, being photographed dropping a 2,000 year-old Han vase or indeed the overpainting of Neolithic vases. Ai looks vaguely embarrassed when I mention this destructiveness,

"I told the police: Without you, I would never have become so noticeable as an artist" he was arrested Václav Havel signed a letter calling for his release and he even has an asteroid named after him.

Does he enjoy his celebrity? “Anybody would be touched by a real emotion which says ‘we support you, your effort’.

I’m just an ordinary guy.” But, I point out, he is very far from an ordinary guy. “Well, I bear responsibility. I enjoy the recognition. It is not abstract. If you can use your power from art or freedom of expression to communicate with people, I think that is something beyond my imagination.”

So does he want to change China? “Art is deeply rooted in every human being so certainly it can be used to change society. I think that is possible.”

Ai’s art, the agent of this putative change, is based around the “readymade”, the genre pioneered early in the 20th century by his hero, Marcel Duchamp, in which everyday objects are repurposed as art. Ai’s work is large scale and uses such items as wooden stools and bicycles which are joined together in great numbers to resemble giant structures, such as Crick and Watson’s model of DNA. There is a series of Neolithic Chinese vases that he has dipped in lividly bright commercial paint, so that the modern colours drip down the ancient shapes.

There is antique Chinese furniture that has been cut and rejointed with perfect craftsmanship at strange, unstable

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so surprising in someone who felt the full effect of the anti-historical Cultural Revolution. Those works, he says, reflected his early response to “human assumptions towards the value of the past”. “I did them as a joke, an act.

In the early 1990s I never thought there was a chance of there being such a thing as a public artist again.” He didn’t think they would be seen. Would he do the same again?

“I’m not interested in that sort of attitude any more.” They were, he agrees, a young man’s statement.

He also once claimed that being an artist is like being a virus. The phrase makes him uncomfortable (“My mind is sometimes so awkward and I have this sense that I have to give some sort of explanation”) but he doesn’t disavow his virus status. “There is,” he says, “no way to stop me. It’s not possible. The only way to stop me is to put me away. They tried and that didn’t work that well.”

Although many people are involved in the construction of the works, Ai Weiwei's art is not collaborative.

Although many people are involved in the construction of the works, Ai Weiwei’s art is not collaborative.

Are you then in a battle with the government, I ask. “For a moment I felt I’m like a chess player and I’m going to win the game. I no longer think that way. I haven’t lost

Ai Wei Wei

Ai Wei Wei - Forever Bicycles, 2012.

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From criminal to art-world superstar a moment I felt I’m like a chess player and I’m going to win the game. I no longer think that way. I haven’t lost the confidence but if the table is going to be overthrown and you’re going to be put in a dark basement, then you think again about the game.” He later likens the situation to a boxing match, with the return of his passport marking a break between rounds: “But it is not a boxing match for 12 rounds but for 120 rounds.”

Ai lives, he says, in a permanent state of anxiety and doubt.

Partly because of the possibility of rearrest and because his acts have consequences for those around him: “With many of my close friends, my lawyers, my allies, my colleagues still in jail – not sentenced after a year and a half – that would make anybody hesitate.” Not that this changes his provocateur stance: “It doesn’t change my beliefs. My actions would only be changed if my own method of defence is shown not to work really well.”

He is anxious too because that is his artistic nature. Of his work, he notes that “You have to feel it’s a little bit impossible, you don’t want to know you’re going to win. If you do there’s not a challenge there.” He has responsibilities to his team too, a core of some 40 people rising to 100 when the various fabricators are added in. Ai’s art, however, is not collaborative. “I’m the one who makes all the decisions, covers every inch, every setting, material, paragraph, I try to do as much as I can.

That’s why I never have a vacation. Weekends, I don’t go to church. I work seven days a week, I’m always the first one in the office, at seven, and the last one to leave, at midnight or one o’clock.” Given the scale, labour intensiveness and sheer cost of making his art (he has a roster of dealers around the world: whatever Ai’s art is about it is also about money), he must be racked with doubts. Sunflower Seeds, for example, was no jeu d’esprit but was two and a half years in the making and involved 1,600 craftsmen and women to paint the 100m porcelain seeds, each of which represented 13 people (adding up to the entire population

of China). In such a project there is no room for second thoughts halfway through.

“I question the whole time,” Ai says. “You have to defend your own position. So if you find a work is too weak or it won’t become what you originally thought … that’s the worst time. You really have to trust what you’re doing.”

Or, in one of the many gnomic metaphors that pepper his conversation, “A baby isn’t born as a soldier or fighter, it has to go through a very long practice, that can be a very dark, very terrible period of time but it is so rewarding, every time you have that difficulty it becomes a work you feel better about … The child who likes to cry becomes the child you give more love to – a Chinese saying – well, art is like that” And, on a roll now: “The harvest doesn’t become a harvest unless you work on the fields the whole time.”

Given the stress inherent in both his activist life and in producing big-sweep art, I ask him if he ever makes small-scale, personal pieces, about his partner and child, perhaps, or about love and intimacy. In a convoluted metaphor he explains that “I tell people I’m just like a plumber, and people in my building call me up and say my pipe’s leaking, can you come up? The toilet won’t flush, will you come? But I’m also very good at biochemistry but no one in the whole building calls me for that. There’s no need for a biochemist but there is for plumbers. So I have become like a skilful, expert plumber.” A plumber, it seems, is the artist he is, a biochemist is the artist he could be. In the end Ai gives up on the metaphor too. “To answer your question, I’m sure I’d be pretty good at doing things about the people I care for but I’d rather leave that [sort of art] for others.” He describes his family as “part of me”.

What visitors to the RA exhibition will see is the work of someone who believes that art no longer works in “the old way, with a few masters, but of different fields full of discoveries” – made by a plumber who dreams of being a biochemist.

Ai Weiwei - Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995.

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Love and Lust in LA

A

bout a year ago, the California-based director duo Will Hoffman and Julius Metoyer began exploring how sex is portrayed in film, and found themselves unsatisfied with their discoveries. LOVER sees them defining the essence of the sexual act in its truest form. Casting a friends and Craigslist finds in LA, the pair embarked on a weeklong mission to document the couples in the intimate surroundings of their bedrooms. Below, Hoffman and Metoyer discuss sex and raw intimacy in, and on, film.

On LOVER “Sex scenes in narrative films are always so-so, and porn is just on a whole other level of insincerity. We wanted to

make a film that wasn’t about watching sex, but instead, triggered memories of the way you felt when emotionally surrendered with a partner. That moment where you let go of judgment or self-consciousness and just open yourself up to impulse and desire.”

On sex in film “Porn seems to be a style of filmmaking that is focused solely on sexually graphic and explicit imagery. People love it and it’s proven its popularity, but its specific representation of sex makes all sex seem like this dirty thing. If your only goal is to arouse someone then you should make porn. If you want to try to make someone

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Love and Lust in LA

Going under the covers in the search for real sex and intimacy

think or feel something else, you have to create a different set of rules, most of which we made up along the way.”

On filming sex “We quickly realized that having our couples turn anywhere from 90 to 180 degrees was a lot easier than breaking down the camera and repositioning the lens. To maximize our footage we had to speak up and say things like, ‘Can you do that but put your heads toward the window?’ Speaking up was weird at first, but you learned that there was a right time to ask and a wrong time ask.”

Watch the video at sundaypaper.com/loveandlustinla

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Night

London should finally get its 24-hour weekend tube service in 2016 – how does all-night travel work in other cities around the world?

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Riders New York Subway

T

he day after moving to Brooklyn from London I asked my friend what time the subways shut. A beatific smile dawned on her face as she said: “Never”. The trains have run all day and all night since 27 October 1904, when the city’s first underground section opened. At 2.45am at Marcy Avenue station, just south of the Williamsburg bridge, an occasional car passes below the elevated tracks with a burst of hip-hop. The J train runs through here – from which Jay Z supposedly took his name – from way out east in Queens, through Brooklyn, and into Manhattan.

In the subway car, three people are asleep and three are sleepily looking at their phones. The one person doing neither is 24-year-old Serena, in leopard-print leggings and purple sneakers. “I’ve just left my girlfriend’s house and

I’m going to my mom’s,” she says, then swivels round to the subway map behind her, points at a stop in Bed-Stuy, frowns and asks, “Do you know how I get here?”

One stop later a giggly woman in her 20s gets on. “It’s really late, but that’s cool!” she says loudly. Then, laughing, asks: “Hey do you know if this goes to Canal Street?” Then suddenly it is Canal Street and this is very funny to her.

At 3am no one seems to know where they are going, and they’re not afraid to admit it: there’s a small-hours subway solidarity in the messy, weird, New York night. At Broad Street, the end of the line, we cross over to the Brooklynbound tracks. On the platform I talk to Zoe, 19, because she has big swoops of flamingo-coloured shadow above her eyes. She’s with Ike, 18, who like her, is dressed all in black. They have come from a club in Bushwick where they danced “for a minute” then spent many more minutes chatting to a stranger outside. Zoe lives in Portland and wonders aloud about contending with “the smell of human faeces” if she were to move here. Then she revises her position: “It’s nice – it’s like a big sweater.” On the ride home, a man begins beatboxing to himself as the train rises up above ground and courses over the Williamsburg bridge.

And then, the ineluctable last image of the night: there on the platform is a man with a foot-high red mohican, head caved, gently vomiting.

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Metro de Barcelona Every Sunday morning Fatima waits on a packed platform at Liceu station for a train to take her home after finishing a shift in a Barcelona restaurant. Her journey is one many hospitality workers make from the metro station of the main tourist thoroughfare Las Ramblas, surrounded by late night revellers drinking homemade cocktails from emptied-out Coca-Cola bottles. It is here I meet her at the beginning of my 3am journey along Barcelona’s oldest metro line, the L3, which snakes through the centre of the city. Barcelona’s underground train service, consisting of 139 stations on eight lines, has run uninterrupted through every Saturday night since 2007, carrying 1.5 million passengers a year.

Thirty-year-old Arturo, from Mexico, is also calling it a night. A part-time Mariachi singer, he travels widely around the city each weekend. It’s not just the Saturday night trains that ease his journeys; it’s also a network that charges less than €1 per journey, when a traveller buys a T-10 – 10 tickets at a time. In 2014, the price increased from €9.80 to €10.30, but after city-wide protests the mayor reduced the price to €9.95.

skateboarder from Brazil, who has been beaten by the fact that the street festival is located on a hill, like much of the city. As we pass through Plaça Catalunya, more passengers heading to the festival jump on from connecting lines. The carnival atmosphere increases as the train rattles through Diagonal and when it rolls into Fontana, passengers file out on to the narrow platform where someone’s celebratory clap ignites rapturous applause and cheering. The partygoers have reached their destination. Few staff can be seen; the passengers are boisterous but well behaved.

With another nine stops to the end of the line, I alight at Lesseps, where I leave several sleeping passengers. The train will soon empty, turn around and start collecting some of those I can hear enjoying the tapering hours of the festival. Should they miss this one, there will be another along shortly.

Like the rest of Spain, Barcelona has a late-night culture.

Even at 3am people are yet to arrive at their Saturday night destination. Tonight, that is the annual Festa Major de Gràcia. Lluis and Quentin, two students in a group of four, are heading in that direction, as is Erico, a 34-year-old

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Berlin U-Bahn

At around 1am on Sunday, Wittenbergplatz station in the west of Berlin is far calmer than during the day, when it serves as the main station for one of Berlin’s main shopping thoroughfares. The buzz of the ventilation system is audible, as is the hum of the escalator and the tinkle of money spilling from a ticket machine. These are sounds you don’t hear during the day. Josef, a cleaner, gives a quick polish, resembling an affectionate pat, to a sign donated to the Berlin underground in 1952 from the London Transport Executive as a gesture of postwar reconciliation. “I can’t believe London doesn’t have 24-hour-travel, it’s such a world capital,” says Frederike, a 19-year-old biology student. “We’re so used to it, we take it for granted”. She has just left the Prince Charles nightclub on Moritzplatz in Kreuzberg with her boyfriend, Toby.

We’re now miles further east on the U12 – the trendier sector of the city – and it’s around 3am. Toby and Frederike

hopped on at Kottbusser Tor and are heading to a party in Charlottenburg. The train is heaving and there are no free seats. Most people appear to be in the middle of their night out. At Zoo station, Sven, a 51-year-old security guard who is about to go off his nightshift, says it has been a reasonably quiet night, “but still there was the usual amount of foreigners – the Brits being among the worst – who were rowdy and acted like I think they wouldn’t dare to at home. I can see why they have to send bobbies to Mallorca,” he says. The underground managers BVG say they make a decent profit out of the nighttime service. “We certainly don’t run it out of the goodness of our hearts,” says a spokeswoman. Around 800,000 people use the nighttime service, which started running on some lines in 1990 – in keeping with the euphoric spirit of reunification of that year – and has expanded over the past decade so that it now covers the entire network, neatly knitting together the east and the west.

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Dark Lands

Dark Lands Television in Denmark is rubbish, Finnish men like a drink – and Sweden is not exactly a model of democracy. Why, asks one expert, does everybody think the Nordic region is a utopia?

F

or the past few years the world has been in thrall to all things Nordic (for which purpose we must of course add Iceland and Finland to the Viking nations of Denmark, Norway and Sweden). "The Sweet Danish Life: Copenhagen: Cool, Creative, Carefree," simpered National Geographic; "The Nordic Countries: The Next Supermodel", boomed the Economist; "Copenhagen really is wonderful for so many reasons," gushed the Guardian.

Whether it is Denmark's happiness, its restaurants, or TV dramas; Sweden's gender equality, crime novels and retail giants; Finland's schools; Norway's oil wealth and weird songs about foxes; or Iceland's bounce-back from the financial abyss, we have an insatiable appetite for positive Nordic news stories. After decades dreaming of life among olive trees and vineyards, these days for some reason, we Brits are now projecting our need for the existence of an earthly paradise northwards.

I have contributed to the relentless Tetris shower of print columns on the wonders of Scandinavia myself over the years but now I say: enough! Nu er det nok! Enough with foraging for dinner. Enough with the impractical minimalist interiors. Enough with the envious reports on the abolition of gender-specific pronouns. Enough of the unblinking idolatry of all things knitted, bearded, rye bread-based and licorice-laced. It is time to redress the imbalance, shed a little light Beyond the Wall.

Take the Danes, for instance. True, they claim to be the happiest people in the world, but why no mention of the fact they are second only to Iceland when it comes to consuming anti- depressants? And Sweden? If, as a headline in this paper once claimed, it is "the most successful society the world has ever seen", why aren't more of you dreaming of "a little place" in Umeå?

Actually, I have lived in Denmark – on and off – for about a decade, because my wife's work is here (and she's Danish).

Life here is pretty comfortable, more so for indigenous families than for immigrants or ambitious go-getters (Google "Jantelov" for more on this), but as with all the Nordic nations, it remains largely free of armed conflict, extreme poverty, natural disasters and Jeremy Kyle.

So let's remove those rose-tinted ski goggles and take a closer look at the objects of our infatuation …

DENMARK Why do the Danes score so highly on international happiness surveys? Well, they do have high levels of trust and social cohesion, and do very nicely from industrial pork products, but according to the OECD they also work fewer hours per year than most of the rest of the world. As a result, productivity is worryingly sluggish.

How can they afford all those expensively foraged meals and hand-knitted woollens? Simple, the Danes also have the highest level of private debt in the world (four times as much as the Italians, to put it into context; enough to warrant a warning from the IMF), while more than half of them admit to using the black market to obtain goods and services.

Perhaps the Danes' dirtiest secret is that, according to a 2012 report from the Worldwide Fund for Nature, they have the fourth largest per capita ecological footprint in the world. Even ahead of the US. Those offshore windmills may look impressive as you land at Kastrup, but Denmark burns an awful lot of coal. Worth bearing that in mind the next time a Dane wags her finger at your patio heater.

I'm afraid I have to set you straight on Danish television too. Their big new drama series, Arvingerne (The Legacy, when it comes to BBC4 later this year) is stunning, but the reality of prime-time Danish TV is day-to-day, wall-towall reruns of 15-year-old episodes of Midsomer Murders

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The grim truth behind the 'Scandinavian miracle' and documentaries on pig welfare. The Danes of course also have highest taxes in the world (though only the sixth-highest wages – hence the debt, I guess). As a spokesperson I interviewed at the Danish centre-right thinktank Cepos put it, they effectively work until Thursday lunchtime for the state's coffers, and the other day and half for themselves.

Presumably the correlative of this is that Denmark has the best public services? According to the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment rankings (Pisa), Denmark's schools lag behind even the UK's. Its health service is buckling too. (The other day, I turned up at my local A&E to be told that I had to make an appointment, which I can't help feeling rather misunderstands the nature of the service.) According to the World Cancer Research Fund, the Danes have the highest cancer rates on the planet. "But at least the trains run on time!" I hear you say.

No, that was Italy under Mussolini. The Danish national rail company has skirted bankruptcy in recent years, and the trains most assuredly do not run on time. Somehow, though, the government still managed to find £2m to fund a two-year tax-scandal investigation largely concerned, as far as I can make out, with the sexual orientation of the prime minister's husband, Stephen Kinnock.

Most seriously of all, economic equality – which many believe is the foundation of societal success – is decreasing. According to a report in Politiken this month, the proportion of people below the poverty line has doubled over the last decade. Denmark is becoming a nation divided, essentially, between the places which have a branch of Sticks'n'Sushi (Copenhagen) and the rest. Denmark's provinces have become a social dumping ground for non-western immigrants, the elderly, the unemployed and the unemployable who live alongside Denmark's 22m intensively farmed pigs, raised 10 to a pen and pumped full of antibiotics (the pigs, that is).

Other awkward truths? There is more than a whiff of the police state about the fact that Danish policeman refuse to display ID numbers and can refuse to give their names.

The Danes are aggressively jingoistic, waving their redand-white dannebrog at the slightest provocation. Like the Swedes, they embraced privatisation with great enthusiasm (even the ambulance service is privatised); and can seem spectacularly unsophisticated in their race relations (cartoon depictions of black people with big lips and bones through their noses are not uncommon in the national press). And if you think a move across the North Sea would help you escape the paedophiles, racists, crooks and tax-dodging corporations one reads about in the British media on a daily basis, I'm afraid I must disabuse you of that too. Got plenty of them.

Plus side? No one talks about cricket.

NORWAY The dignity and resolve of the Norwegian people in the wake of the attacks by Anders Behring Breivik in July 2011 was deeply impressive, but in September the rightwing, anti-Islamist Progress party – of which Breivik had been an active member for many years – won 16.3%

of the vote in the general election, enough to elevate it into coalition government for the first time in its history.

There remains a disturbing Islamophobic sub-subculture in Norway. Ask the Danes, and they will tell you that the Norwegians are the most insular and xenophobic of all the Scandinavians, and it is true that since they came into a bit of money in the 1970s the Norwegians have become increasingly Scrooge-like, hoarding their gold, fearful of outsiders.

Though 2013 saw a record number of asylum applications to Norway, it granted asylum to fewer than half of them (around 5,000 people), a third of the number that less wealthy Sweden admits (Sweden accepted over 9,000 from Syria alone). In his book Petromania, journalist Simon Sætre warns that the powerful oil lobby is "isolating us and making the country asocial". According to him, his countrymen have been corrupted by their oil money, are working less, retiring earlier, and calling in sick more frequently. And while previous governments have controlled the spending of oil revenues, the new bunch are threatening a splurge which many warn could lead to full-blown Dutch disease.

Like the dealer who never touches his own supply, those dirty frackers the Norwegians boast of using only renewable energy sources, all the while amassing the world's largest sovereign wealth fund selling fossil fuels to the rest of us.

As Norwegian anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen put it to me when I visited his office in Oslo University: "We've always been used to thinking of ourselves as part of the solution, and with the oil we suddenly became part of the problem. Most people are really in denial."

ICELAND We need not detain ourselves here too long. Only 320,000 – it would appear rather greedy and irresponsible – people cling to this breathtaking, yet borderline uninhabitable rock in the North Atlantic. Further attention will only encourage them.

FINLAND I am very fond of the Finns, a most pragmatic, redoubtable people with a Sahara-dry sense of humour.

But would I want to live in Finland? In summer, you'll be plagued by mosquitos, in winter, you'll freeze – that's assuming no one shoots you, or you don't shoot yourself.

Finland ranks third in global gun ownership behind only America and Yemen; has the highest murder rate in western Europe, double that of the UK; and by far the highest suicide rate in the Nordic countries.

The Finns are epic Friday-night bingers and alcohol is now the leading cause of death for Finnish men. "At some point in the evening around 11.30pm, people start behaving aggressively, throwing punches, wrestling," Heikki Aittokoski, foreign editor of Helsingin Sanomat, told me.

"The next day, people laugh about it. In the US, they'd have an intervention."

With its tarnished crown jewel, Nokia, devoured by Microsoft, Finland's hitherto robust economy is more

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Dark Lands Sweden Anything I say about the Swedes will pale in comparison to their own excoriating self-image. A few years ago, the Swedish Institute of Public Opinion Research asked young Swedes to describe their compatriots. The top eight adjectives they chose were: envious, stiff, industrious, nature loving, quiet, honest, dishonest, xenophobic.

I met with Åke Daun, Sweden's most venerable ethnologist.

"Swedes seem not to 'feel as strongly' as certain other people", Daun writes in his excellent book, Swedish Mentality. "Swedish women try to moan as little as possible during childbirth and they often ask, when it is all over, whether they screamed very much. They are very pleased to be told they did not." Apparently, crying at funerals is frowned upon and "remembered long afterwards".

The Swedes are, he says, "highly adept at insulating themselves from each other". They will do anything to avoid sharing a lift with a stranger, as I found out during a day-long experiment behaving as un-Swedishly as possible in Stockholm.

Effectively a one-party state – albeit supported by a couple of shadowy industrialist families – for much of the 20th century, "neutral" Sweden (one of the world largest arms exporters) continues to thrive economically thanks to its distinctive brand of totalitarian modernism, which curbs freedoms, suppresses dissent in the name of consensus, and seems hell-bent on severing the bonds between wife and husband, children and parents, and elderly on their children. Think of it as the China of the north.

Youth unemployment is higher than the UK's and higher than the EU average; integration is an ongoing challenge; and as with Norway and Denmark, the Swedish right is on the rise. A spokesman for the Sweden Democrats (currently at an all-time high of close to 10% in the polls) insisted to me that immigrants were "more prone to violence". I pointed out that Sweden was one of the most bloodthirsty nations on earth for much of the last millennium. I was told we'd run out of time.

Ask the Finns and they will tell you that Swedish ultrafeminism has emasculated their men, but they will struggle to drown their sorrows. Their state-run alcohol monopoly stores, the dreaded Systembolaget, were described

by Susan Sontag as "part funeral parlour, part backroom abortionist".

The myriad successes of the Nordic countries are no miracle, they were born of a combination of Lutheran modesty, peasant parsimony, geographical determinism and ruthless pragmatism ("The Russians are attacking?

Join the Nazis! The Nazis are losing? Join the Allies!").

These societies function well for those who conform to the collective median, but they aren't much fun for tall poppies. Schools rein in higher achievers for the sake of the less gifted; "elite" is a dirty word; displays of success, ambition or wealth are frowned upon. If you can cope with this, and the cost, and the cold (both metaphorical and

The Nordic nations Respond DENMARK Adam Price, creator of Borgen It was quite a funny article. I'm sure it's well researched and I recognise it's tongue in cheek, but I think the Brits themselves have created this image of the perfect Scandi wonderland – where we have the perfect model for the perfect society. It's true we take care of our young and old and education is free; anyone can be a doctor with good grades. But we pay 68% tax for that welfare. The difference is our culture: put it to a referendum and the Danes would always vote for the system we have versus, say, the US one.

There are nuances in British culture that don't resonate here either. A recent survey of Brits saw 67% admit that it's still very much not what you know, but who you know. Class matters a lot in Britain; Denmark is a more homogenous society: we're a little people and, yes, we do love an awful lot of crime drama (including Inspector Morse and Midsomer Murders), but we stick together. Sunday night TV crime dramas are a national event; there is a greater sense of community. Sure, we Danes are very happy when it comes to answering happiness surveys – and why shouldn't we be? We take an awful lot of antidepressants!

It's a funny statistic when you put the two things together but shows we're a privileged nation with ups, downs and struggles.

FINLAND Alexander Stubb; We Finns have a great sense of humour and Michael Booth's piece was a good laugh.

It's always good to look at yourself in the mirror and for an outsider to reflect on that image. But the truth is that Finland has emerged as a top three country in the past 20 years and much of it has been because of the EU and the end of the cold war. Once, people would have taken Booth's criticism seriously; now we can brush it off like dandruff because if you look at international measures – from the OECD, the World Economic Forum, the UN – we dominated the top spot in education for half a decade for many years; we are number three in competitiveness, in the top 10 for happiness, and one of the world's least corrupt states at number ones in the world.

It is difficult to take the author's criticisms seriously, bearing in mind that he comes from a country still reliant on a Victorian plumbing system. At least in Denmark, Booth can take a warm shower whenever he wants.

As for calling us the drunks of Europe? I've been out in the UK on a Friday night: our drinking habits seem very British, if anything. Our landscape "samey"? We have the beautiful archipelago of 20,000 islands; the Lake District with more than 100,000 lakes; and Lapland. You can't not fall in love with it. There is nothing fake about the average Finn: what you see is what you get. We may not be big talkers, but if a Finn likes you he will eventually open up. And we joke about it ourselves. How do you tell the difference between

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The grim truth behind the 'Scandinavian miracle' a Finnish introvert and a Finnish extrovert? One looks at his own feet when he's talking to you, the other will looks at yours.

The bottom line is that these are hilarious stereotypes and, as with all stereotypes, there's an element of truth. But we Scandinavians can take the mick out of ourselves just fine.

NORWAY Agnes Bolsø; Michael Booth's account doesn't capture the overall sociocultural and political climate in this country. There have been reversals with the newly elected rightwing government. These include reducing the father's share of parental leave and steps to undermine abortion law, as well as tax cuts for the rich, measures making life tougher for small-scale farmers, and an expansion of private schools. In the global economy, it is almost impossible to maintain fully social democratic policies, but this government is launching deliberate attacks on collective and sustainable solutions. However, many Norwegians are fighting back and provoking lively debate. None of these contemporary challenges to Norwegian society, or the resistance to them, is mentioned in Booth's random summary of shifts in policy. Yet these are the issues that could genuinely influence whether the country remains a good place to live, and discussing them would be more interesting than the narrow perspective he provides.

SWEDEN Lars Trägürdh; The Nordic model has long served as a rhetorical batting ball in other countries.

One moment held up as utopia; the next unmasked as a totalitarian hell. The founding father of the latter trope was Eisenhower, who declared that Sweden followed "socialist philosophy and whose rate of suicide has gone up almost unbelievably. Drunkeness has gone up. Lack of ambition is discernible on all sides." Michael Booth's lament sits firmly within this narrative. There is no "totalitarian" conspiracy to sever bonds between family members, as Booth argued.

But modern Sweden is infused by a moral logic that seeks to balance the deep existential desire for individual freedom and social cohesion. It has been promoted through the democratic state via laws and policies that have freed individuals from unequal and patriarchal forms of community, including the traditional family, charities, and the churches. We are talking free choice, not coercion.

This social compact is not everyone's cup of tea. If one harbours deep suspicion of the state, prefers traditional gender roles and dislikes children's rights, then Sweden is indeed a place to avoid. But make no mistake: while Swedes may look extreme in their embrace of individual autonomy, the general trend is the same all over the world.

More troubling is the enduring commitment to a national welfare state that is de facto limited to citizens and legal residents. In an age of migration and globalisation this brings to the fore a potent conflict between rights of citizens and human rights. It constitutes a deep challenge to democracy as we know it.

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