From snow-clearing to bus stops, civic furniture to football teams, women and men are considered and treated equally in this small city in Scandinavia – with the aim of making life happier for everyone

The big red puma is the focal point of Umeå. The world’s first publicly commissioned statue dedicated to the #MeToo movement depicts a snarling cat atop a steel frame designed to imitate prison bars. Its official title, according to its artist creator Camilla Akraka, is Listen but everyone just calls it “puman” – the Puma. Since it appeared in the main square in front of the old city hall in 2019, it has become the crowning symbol for this quiet, unassuming place a few hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle, known to some as “the most feminist city in the world”.

Umeå (pronounced oo-may-yoh, population 134,000) is famous in Sweden as the home of radical ideas and of “the red university” – during the 70s, the city hosted a large number of student strikes and left-wing, politically active students. A Swedish friend tells me that “everyone in Umeå is heavily into punk”. This seems to be a sort of code to mean that Umeå is thought of – and thinks of itself – as essentially “cool”. Even the website of Visit Umeå, the local tourist board, claims that the city has “the beardiest and most heavily tattooed population in the world”. Boringly, this does not refer to the women.