4 of 8Rosengård, Malmö, Sweden

There used to be a fountain surrounding this sculpture. But since kids would piss in it and older kids would throw shampoo into it, the water was removed and replaced with cement and cobblestones. Of course it is stupid to vandalise a nice fountain, but high-school kids have been pouring shampoo into the fountain in central Helsingborg every year, and sometimes even more often - yet nobody would suggest we simply turn off the water and plug the holes with concrete there. The fountain in Husby Centrum, Stockholm, has been shampooed a number of times and is in a poor neighborhood, but is still filled with water, not concrete. It appears to be assumed that those living in Rosengård are acting together in a big conspiracy. Thus the fountain in Rosengård was built with the implicit condition that if anyone of the 10,000+ people there should damage it, then we'll take it away from everyone, because the act of the one is assumed to be implicitly sanctioned by all. It is the "if you can't take care of nice things, then you can't have them" line of reasoning, but it can't reasonably be applied here. If the people of Rosengård had the means and the time to guard the fountain 24/7, and we lived in a society where such a demand could be made of people, then we definitely can demand that the fountain not be touched. But they don't, and we don't, and we can't. The end result is that a few people are allowed to leverage Swedish local government against the majority, because if they just do damage to a good thing, like the fountain, then Swedish government steps in and completes the destruction of the good thing for them.

From: Rosengård