Saturday, September 1, 2012 — Viðeyjarsund to Klukkuvellir by Foot

A rather gloomy and rainy day, but not too wet to pre­vent me from tak­ing a long urban hike of about thir­ty kilo­me­ters that would give me a good idea of the lay­out and neigh­bour­hoods of greater Reyk­javik. My start­ing point was the Höfðy, the old house where Ronald Rea­gan and Mikhael Gor­bochev held their famous sum­mit meet­ing in 1986. I first went north­east from the cen­ter to Sun­dahöfn Har­bour. One end of the har­bour has some huge cruise ships; the oth­er is con­tain­er port, look­ing very mod­ern, but qui­et these days. I then turned south through the Lau­gardalur, a large park con­tain­ing var­i­ous urban amuse­ments, includ­ing a zoo and one of the most pop­u­lar geot­her­mal pools.  South of this, I walked through a hous­ing project. It has the unmis­tak­able stamp of planned social hous­ing, but it is well-main­tained and clean, if a lit­tle dull. At any rate, it has a good enough mix of build­ings, easy access to reg­u­lar urban neigh­bour­hoods, and no hint of social degra­da­tion. Fur­ther south is the Kringlan shop­ping mall, a trans­plant from the uni­ver­sal indoor shop­ping mall cat­a­logue that exhibits no notice­able Ice­landic fea­ture. Pass­ing an inlet of the sea and a creek bed, I left the City of Reyk­javik and entered Kópavogur. With 30,000 peo­ple, this is Ice­land’s sec­ond largest “city”. It rejoic­es in the coun­try’s tallest “sky­scraper”, a glass office tow­er of twen­ty sto­ries. But most of Kópavogur is pleas­ant res­i­den­tial streets with neat, not par­tic­u­lar­ly fan­cy hous­es. There a small strip malls and stan­dard sub­ur­ban things. I’ve seen no sign of the glob­al chains like Mac­don­ald’s, Burg­er King, or Ken­tucky Fried Chick­en*, and sub­ur­ban restau­rants (often Thai food or Ice Cream par­lours) are usu­al­ly incor­po­rat­ed into a larg­er build­ing rather than iso­lat­ed in their own park­ing lots. There is, how­ev­er, a con­stant pres­ence of Domi­no’s Piz­za — but the piz­za served lit­tle resem­bles the card­board stuff that chain is famous for. The piz­za is adjust­ed to Ice­landic taste, with ingre­di­ents that would baf­fle a North American.

Haf­nar­fjörður

I con­tin­ued through to Haf­nafjörður, which is actu­al­ly old­er than Reyk­javik, and pre­serves some hand­some 19th cen­tu­ry hous­es. Hilly, and tight­ly con­cen­trat­ed in a fine nat­ur­al har­bour that has been used since the Mid­dle Ages, it would prob­a­bly be my choice if I had to live in the Reyk­javik metro region. A half-hour bus ride would get me to the 101’s book­stores and night clubs, and I would find the tree-filled streets and well-craft­ed old hous­es more to my taste. It is, how­ev­er, hemmed in by lava beds, and it is these, south of Haf­nafjörður, that I reached the dark secret: Klukku­vel­lir, a sub­ur­ban devel­op­ment so soul-less and depress­ing that it could have been built by French nou­velle vague film-mak­ers of the 1960s as a set for a dystopi­an sci­ence fic­tion film. This thing was start­ed only sev­en years ago and appears still under con­struc­tion. Ster­ile apart­ment blocks and hous­es are plunked geo­met­ri­cal­ly on a flat field of black lava. Lawns are graft­ed onto this life­less soil, and don’t look like they will take. The old­er patch­es are yel­low and dying. All the struc­tures are white, clean-look­ing, and well-enough con­struct­ed, but they have a soul-crush­ing bland­ness and same­ness. Though sup­pos­ed­ly inhab­it­ed, I could see nobody in the wind­ing streets except a cou­ple of bored-look­ing kids. While cov­ers a huge area, I did not see a sin­gle store of any kind, and absolute­ly noth­ing to do oth­er than cow­er in your home. The inhab­i­tants clear­ly have to dri­ve to near­est shop­ping unless they wish to take a very long walk car­ry­ing parcels. I had no idea that any­one was still mak­ing stuff like this. Only a robot or the sub­ject of a pre-frontal lobot­o­my could live there. Has­n’t any­body in Ice­land heard of Jane Jacobs?

The lay­out of these towns forced me to return almost exact­ly by the same route, so I couldn´t real­ly add to the expe­ri­ence beyond this point.

*I sub­se­quent­ly found three KFC’s in Reykjavik

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