Seminariumparken

Most cities try to downplay their rainy reputations. Gothenburg decided to lean in. With rain falling roughly 40% of the time, the Swedish city launched an audacious plan to become “the world’s best city when it rains,” complete with rain playgrounds, poetry cast onto manhole covers that only appears when wet, and polar bear footprints painted in special rain activated paint. The crown jewel is a 160 year old school garden transformed into “the world’s best park when it rains,” featuring a rain pavilion where visitors can sit and watch rainfall cascade through funnels and channels.

The whole project began life inside the city’s water and waste disposal department, which is a fittingly unglamorous origin for something that now involves poetry, polar bears, and a park redesigned entirely around precipitation. The tourist board had spent years marketing a version of Gothenburg that barely exists, since the city gets soaked nearly two days out of every five. Rather than keep pretending, the municipality hired an artist to make peace with the weather, and Seminarieparken, a school garden dating to the 1860s, became the proof of concept. Local architects working on the project have reportedly needed some persuading, since most of them had spent entire careers designing rain out of public spaces rather than into them.