What happens when urban planning focuses on people and sustainability? Copenhagen has an answer.
Nordhavn. Photo by Rasmus Hjortshøj, COAST (cobe.dk/place/nordhavn)
Every modern city planner and urban innovator ends up in Copenhagen during the search for inspiration, know-how and partnerships in urban sustainability. So did Wolfscape and the project Hundipea team.
Copenhagen really is the role model and has been leading the way in green and smart urban development for decades. The city has set an ambitious goal to become the world’s first carbon neutral capital in 2025. The CPH 2025 Climate Plan, a roadmap for 2021-2025, was created to make it happen.
Copenhagen’s commitment to sustainability has redefined the city’s urban environment, and there are many aspects of Copenhagen’s case study worth investigating. Still, we’re especially curious about learning about some specific topics and applying them at Hundipea: urban density and human-centric design, accessibility and mobility, and the influence of nature in planning.
Human-centric design and the Soft City concept
Copenhagen is known for its people-friendly architecture and city planning. It's highly influenced by the Danish architect Jan Gehl, founding partner of Gehl Architects. The Copenhagen-based firm Gehl has long pioneered the idea of people-centred urban design.
The story goes back to the 60s when the young architect Gehl married a psychologist and had many discussions about why architects and city planners did not pay much attention to the human side of architecture. Together with his wife, Gehl studied the overlap between sociology, psychology, architecture, and planning. Using Copenhagen as the laboratory for the concepts developed, Gehl's work has transformed the back then car-dependent city into a denser, mix-function, mix-use bicycle city with pleasant living conditions.
The key to people-friendly cities is a design that connects people. The urban expert David Sim, previously a partner and creative director at Gehl, covers the topic in his 2019 book Soft City on how to combine the quality of life with more dense cities. He suggests that instead of looking for high-tech solutions to solve urban issues, we should use simple, low-tech, low-cost solutions. Such as ground-level design that creates a safe and lively environment, connects people, boosts the local economy, and makes getting around from A to B on bicycle or foot convenient.
Soft City book cover © Gehl/Island Press
A soft city street is spacious and full of life. Instead of cars parked everywhere, the streets are filled with people. The buildings' ground floors enrich the environment acting as extensions of the street: shops being partly outdoors, cafes spreading out as terraces, and big-windowed galleries showcasing art directly to bypassers. The backyards too are designed thoughtfully. They are green and pleasant oases for the residents to regularly spend time outside, offering children a safe place to play.
It's a city environment that directly boosts people’s well-being.
Urban density
Urban density is one of the cornerstones of human-centric and sustainable cities.
Still, many cities are developed outward from urban centres, including Tallinn, where a growing number of agricultural areas around the city are being turned into residential ones. Such isolated neighbourhoods are highly inefficient, and the main reason behind growing car ownership. They are designed simply for living and sleeping and are missing the essential services and businesses nearby. Daily life happening far from home requires regular commutes by personal car – just to go to work or meet up with friends.
In a dense city with services, grocery stores, and jobs close to home, it's easy to live car-free. A thoughtfully created dense mix-use area is where homes, workplaces and public spaces merge. Fewer cars mean more space on the street for cafes, bicycle lanes, shops and greenery. Dense cities also have a much smaller carbon footprint. It's a win-win.
However, simply adding density is not a solution. Density must go hand in hand with other elements, such as proper infrastructure for cycling and walking, an equal distribution of space between commercial and residential premises, thoughtfully integrated green areas, and a convenient high-speed public transport network. The public spaces should unite the population and support opportunities for individual well-being.
Urban density in Copenhagen and Nordhavn
Copenhagen's population has grown by one-third since 2000. The residential environments of the city have become denser – and more sustainable – over the last 20 years. Instead of building new distant suburbs, previous brownfields are being transformed into new modern neighbourhoods in Copenhagen. Let's take a look at one of the most outstanding developments in the city, Nordhavn, as an example.
Nordhavn is an old industrial zone that is turned into a dense and compact urban district with high buildings and small-scale family housing, shops, offices and room for culture and sports. It is located on docks and piers and surrounded by canals, water basins, and the sea, breaking the area into individual islets, each developed in separate stages over 50 years.
Nordhavn. Photo by Rasmus Hjortshøj, COAST (cobe.dk/place/nordhavn)
There is a green expressway for biking and metro at Nordhavn, connecting the islets with each other and the neighbourhood with the rest of Copenhagen. It's a city where it is easier to walk, bike or use public transport than to drive a car.
Nordhaven follows Carlos Moreno’s 15-minute city concept that states we should be able to access most of the places we need to go within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. “Walkable and bikeable neighbourhoods need to be the norm, not the exception. They need to be accessible financially, not just physically,” writes Dan Luscher on 15minutecity.com.
For longer commutes, fast public transport needs to be in place. In many cities, including Copenhagen, it’s the metro. A fun fact – Copenhagen’s metro’s first section opened only in 2002, proving it is possible to add an underground train network to already developed cities. Today, Copenhagen’s metro runs through 39 stations on four lines.
Planning for climate resilience
Copenhageners are already feeling the impacts of climate change more rapidly, and more acutely than many cities in Europe due to Copenhagen's unique geography. Copenhagen’s Climate Adaptation Plan from 2011 identifies rainfall and flooding as the city’s key threats. The plan states that the city should expect up to a 1-meter rise in sea level over the next 100 years.
The Climate Adaption Plan puts landscape architecture at the core of planned upgrades to existing areas and the development of new ones. The city has identified a network of key roads as channels to guide water into underground reservoirs that act as safety valves, thereby reducing flooding in low-lying areas.
Another design response is Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS) that have been created in the form of bumps, embankments, ditches and kerbs redirecting the water into areas where it causes the least damage, such as sports grounds, parks and open spaces.
Enghaveparken. Photo by Tredje Natur
Enghaveparken, a park located at the bottom of a hill in the heart of Vesterbro, used to get flooded by water during heavy rainfalls. Today, the biggest climate project in Copenhagen, the park is designed to be a mixed-use sports and recreation area that turns into a 22.600 m3 water reservoir during downpours. The redesign has brought people back to the space that had become purposeless and desolate. Enghavenparken is an excellent example of how adapting to the changing climate is also an opportunity to upgrade the landscape for people.
The park was redesigned by the Danish architecture firm Tredje Natur. The team has developed many other groundbreaking climate adaptation projects and award-winning sustainable urban strategies worth checking out on their website.
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Everything we learned and saw during our trip to Copenhagen and our conversations with the people behind some of Denmark’s most outstanding urban projects affirmed that we’re on the right track with our pilot project Hundipea. It confirmed that local and international collaboration is the key to every ambitious urban project.