A Green MP tasked with planning sustainable neighbourhoods in Sweden has said the government can build new cities to deal with an unprecedented demand for housing.

Amid worsening housing shortages after a record 163,000 migrants entered the country last year, the government has appointed Johan Edstav as a special coordinator to investigate novel ways of providing accommodation for the country’s fast-growing population. Speaking to Swedish Radio last week, the Green party politician said taxpayers could build brand new cities or resorts, which would each house around 50,000 people.

“The sky is the limit, you could say in this area. The need is of course very large. There is no limitation in my mission to see how big these resorts can be,” Edstav said.

Asserting that construction sites should be about an hour from the major cities, the housing coordinator informed Sweden’s public broadcaster that such places are “where housing is most needed.”

Estav will submit a costed plan in March to Housing Minister Peter Eriksson, followed by a final statement in June.

On Thursday, Eriksson said the prospect of building whole new cities as a solution to the country’s booming population is “very exciting.” “It provides opportunities for Sweden to show that it is possible to build in a way that’s long-term and sustainable,” he told financial newspaper Dagens Industri.

Stating developments “must [consist of] 10,000 homes and upwards,” the housing Minister said new cities will be designed to have their own centres, workplaces, and living quarters along with all the services available in existing cities today.

Reactions on Sweden’s biggest forum, Flashback, to the plans were mixed.

“A new city in the north surrounded by a wall, where all immigrants can live with Sharia law, completely cut off from the rest of Sweden could be a good idea,” wrote a user calling themselves JDAM.

Another user called the idea “fantasy and idiocy,” pointing out that cities grow “symbiotically with innovation, jobs, industry and more. They’re not something you can just build.”

“Swedish taxpayers are going to fund the artificial cities that don’t have even one per cent of self-sufficiency, and will be inhabited by imported Arabs?” the user went on to say.

Noting “it requires a lot of energy” for the temperature to be comfortable for people living in Sweden, a post written by “Mertilen” complained the plan would mean “valuable arable land and natural resources [would] disappear,” and lamented that “the towns would be ugly.”

“How annoyed I’ve become, at Sweden. The country’s become almost worthless in every way,” the poster added.

In July, Breitbart London reported that Sweden will need to build nearly half a million new homes in the next five years just to cope with surging migrant demand. This is equivalent to requiring a whole new city the size of their capital, Stockholm, by 2020.