Nya Linjer is an exhibition of student work from the third year of KTH's School of Architecture, produced during the autumn semester of 2016. Twenty-five projects are presented across four studios, each addressing a different site in the belt of municipalities that surrounds Stockholm  from Fisksätra in the east to Hjulsta in the west. When the blue metro line is eventually completed, these four places will be joined in a single transit corridor. The exhibition takes that future line as both a physical proposition and a conceptual thread.

The urban landscape in question is neither city nor countryside but something in between: a patchwork of agricultural land, horse farms, summer houses, motorways, shopping centres, housing estates, medieval churches, sports arenas and industrial zones. Roughly half a million people live here. It is a territory shaped by administrative boundaries that sometimes align with the physical landscape, Ekerö and Lidingö are islands in both the political and the geographical sense  and sometimes cut across it entirely.

The question animating all four studios is how this territory can grow. Stockholm's housing shortage falls hardest on young people and families without capital, and the need for new homes is acute. But the city is no longer expanding onto agricultural land the way it did in the twentieth century. Growth today means densiyen the existing a taskthat requires close attention to the specific character of each place.

Studio 1 worked in Fisksätra, probing the relationship between density and typology in an area where extreme concentration at the centre gives way almost immediately to scattered low-density development. Studio 2 took on Sickla and the urban fabric that has grown up along the motorway toward Gustavsberg, using Nacka municipality's own planning document Fundamenta as a starting point. Studio 3 investigated Ursvik and the Sundbyberg municipality, exploring how a site full of contradictions might be developed into a genuinely liveable environment, and how local solutions might generate principles applicable elsewhere. Studio 4 worked with the borderland around Hjulsta, where Stockholm meets Järfälla, reading the complexity of that junction its layered infrastructure, its colliding typologies, its varied topographies.

The work was published in KTHA #3