The number of immigrants in Oslo has increased by 40 percent over the past five years, and the capital is an increasingly popular destination for Norway’s new residents.
Seven suburban city districts have a population segment of over 20 percent of people who come from a non-Western background according to city statistics, and it is this group that is growing most quickly in the capital, newspaper Dagsavisen reports.The figures are from the latest edition of Oslo Speilet (=The Oslo Mirror), a journal based on city statistics and analysis.
There are now 101,649 non-Western immigrants living in Oslo, which is 18.9 percent of the capital’s total population. The non-Western immigrants are not evenly distributed across the city.
“At the end of the 1990s non-Western immigrants began to sell their small one and two-room apartments in downtown Oslo and buy three and four-room apartments in the suburbs instead,” special adviser Paul Håvard Kvangraven at the City’s Department of Development and Human Resources told Dagsavisen.
This means that the outer edges of the city have the highest percentage of non-Western immigrants, with Søndre Nordstrand leading with 38.4 percent.
“It is very unusual that the district Gamle Oslo (Old Oslo) has seen a relative decrease in the amount of non-Western immigrants since 2000. This completely contradicts the predictions from the 1990s that the district would become an immigrant ghetto,” Kvangraven said.
He believes that Oslo’s eastern inner city districts will increasingly go from being immigrant areas to a middle-class Norwegian area over the next decade.
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