Life – a user's manual Part II - Boksidan

Borås tidning, 1930
Movies
Health products
Clothes
Food
Journals and books
The ads for cars, car repair/replacement parts and radio recievers were even more common. Also several ads
for factory-made furniture and occasional ads about refrigerators were found. But clothing, health products
and food dominated. Insurance and Aemigration trips to the U.S. has dropped a lot. Margarine had also lost
its share, but still, it seemed to be war on margarine market. Herring and fruits were now the dominant
products in the food ads. Among the beverage advertisements coffee dominated heavily.
The increasing amount of advertisements for clothing, furniture and building materials, I think clearly
reflects that we were going from a low consumption society, were everyone made everything himself, to a
mass-production and mass consumption society. Finally the increasing amount of movie and dancing ads
(not in the diagram above) and the ads for journals and books shows that people had both a little time and a
little money left over for pure entertainment.
Accommodation standards have improved
As late as the end of World War II, only one in five households had a
bathroom or shower room and two-thirds had no private WC (Kypengren
S, 1976). Furthermore, a fifth of all households in urban areas were
overcrowded 2 . But so much was built in the 60's that the overcrowding
almost disappeared and today there is, in many municipalities, a housing
surplus.
120000
100000
80000
60000
40000
20000
0
Amount of new apartments per year
2.
Over-crowded
were those who
had more than
two residents per
room (kitchen
un-counted).
1950
1956
1962
1968
1974
1980
1986
1992
1998
Building technology became more
efficient. And prefabricated
building elements, like masonite
panels , became more common.
How could a combined food processing and washing place could look like in a
home without water and sewer (environment in the City Museum, Stockholm).
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