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“I would like to start with a story”, Anne Skovbro, CEO of City and Port – an organization which amongst others oversees the development of the port of Copenhagen – said when I went to talk to her about the challenges of climate adaptation and storm water management in Copenhagen. I am interested in finding answers to the question of how Copenhagen is planning for a future that is already chewing its way into the present; given our knowledge of the extreme climate events such as flash floods, cloud bursts, storms, flooding, and droughts that with increasing frequency show their face to Copenhageners. And I set out to talk about these issues with some of the key actors in Copenhagen: Anne Skovbro (CEO, City and Port), Malene Krüger (CEO, Tredje…

Reflecting on the past 30 years of urban planning in Copenhagen Looking back on the past 30 years of development in Copenhagen, it is very clear how every new development in the city attempts to tackle the questions raised by the previous. Once a city on the edge of bankruptcy in the early 1990’s, the city of Copenhagen made the deliberate choice of stepping into the age of knowledge – a new economic paradigm to take over from a former industrial age – a competitive global reality in which Copenhagen was struggling to compete. This represented a major shift in focus from an industrial mindset to an acceptance of “liveability” as a very real and very powerful competitive advantage in the global competition among city economies. And the city –…

The Munch Brygge housing project is located in central Oslo between the Oslo Opera House and the new Munch Museum. The project was awarded the Oslo Association of Architects’ (Oslo Arkitektforening) Architecture Prize in 2019 and has received many positive reviews in some of Norway’s largest periodicals and newspapers. There are four roof terraces on the buildings, which are intended for use by the community. These communal areas create outdoor spaces of varying size for the benefit of all residents. “We wanted to provide something for everyone – be it sitting enjoying a book in peace or as part of a larger group looking for a bit more space to move around in. Thus, some outdoor areas only have one seat, while others have long tables and lots of seating,”…

My interviewing three generations of women for this issue may just highlight a Danish DNA which revolves around a female helix. Connie Faurby is a Copenhagener born in 1944. She lives in the enclave of Frederiksberg – an independent municipality within the Copenhagen’s vicinity known for being an upscale part of town with green areas and an array of special boutiques. Connie was born and bred in Copenhagen. She is one of the residents who happened to have a front row seat witnessing the Danish capital’s urban and social transformation over the last 70 years. Christina Faurby is Connie’s daughter. She is a genuine Copenhagener by birth and upbringing. A mother of three, she is married to Frederik, a native Copenhagener himself. The family dropped anchor 15 years ago in…

TALENT Justine Bell Justine Bell is an architect and lecturer who is one of the founders of Djernes & Bell, an architectural practice based in Copenhagen. Previously, Justine has worked with John Pawson and Carmody Groarke in London and Gottlieb Paludan in Copenhagen. She founded her office in 2020 together with Jonas Djernes. They focus on creating physically and culturally architecture. www.djernesbell.com 1 WHAT EXCITES YOU ABOUT EACH OTHER’S WORK? Anna Maria’s work with existing (often period) buildings was pioneering in Denmark in what is perhaps the most relevant field in architecture globally today. How do we work with existing buildings? How do we keep them relevant for today and for the future? 2 WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU CAN LEARN FROM EACH OTHER? Very specifically, Anna Maria’s experiences in…

The number of bad examples of how our world might transform into something horrendous with the development of storm surge and flood proofing measures, is growing. Therefore, we must make sure the protection strategies are based on both beauty and reason. Around the world we see the rise of traditional “hard” protective measures such as walls and ever taller dikes and other barriers barricading cities against the climate crisis. To avoid this development from also becoming a reality in Denmark we must ‘hurry up slowly’ in developing a holistic approach to climate adaptation planning. If we don’t plan carefully, we might have to live in a deep Dutch bathtub of dikes where large quantities of rainwater from the hinterland will struggle to find its way to the sea. Rising groundwater…

topos: How exactly has Copenhagen changed in the past few years? What were, and are, the challenges? What have been the achievements so far? LINE BARFOD: The major challenge for Copenhagen, as for most other cities in the world, is the climate. And the war now going on in Ukraine only adds to the urgency of finding ways to free ourselves from dependence on oil, without replacing it with a new dependence, for example on Arab oil. On the contrary, we must use the crisis to boost the green transition. Copenhagen is famous as a cycling city, and we have spent many years developing a well-functioning network of cycle paths. We’ve gained more cycle and pedestrian bridges across the harbour, linking up the city and opening up new urban areas…

One of my favorite songs about the city with a beautiful music video of historic Copenhagen youtube.com/watch?v=vSaUWDOexXU Reinventing and internationalizing the traditional Danish porridge, vegetarian only dishes are an added benefit. Multiple locations throughout the city groed.com/en Be sure to book a room with a view in the tower charlottehaven.com/dk/en/hotel/hotelapartments-the-tower/ Situated between mainland Europe and Scandinavia, the Danish capital of Copenhagen enjoys a truly cosmopolitan feel. The city is home to 640,000 inhabitants but boasts a regional population of almost 4 million due to the Øresund Bridge connection to Malmö in Sweden. Copenhagen is recognized globally as an example of best practice urban planning. Its thriving mixed use city center is defined by striking contemporary architecture, engaging public spaces and an abundance of human activity. The city is known for…

Seen from above, the first thing one might notice about Copenhagen’s newly designed Sankt Kjeld’s Square is the large proportion of green area occupying the space between buildings and streets. Islands of vegetation, crowded with bushes and trees – reduced to cloudy dots of different shades of green from this point of view – contrast the monotonous grey of streets, parking spots and rooftops. Paths for pedestrians meander through the different parts of the green space, not searching for the fastest way through, them but offering a curvy stroll through the lush vegetation in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Besides creating recreational space for local citizens and contributing to biodiversity within the city, the transformation of Sankt Kjeld’s Square and Bryggervangen is aimed at cloudburst protection. Designed by studio…

DORTE MANDRUP graduated from the Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark in 1991. Eight years later she founded her Copenhagen-based studio where she continues to be Creative Director. Dorte is member of the Architecture Section in Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Vice Chairman of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, former member of the Historic Buildings Council in Denmark, Chair of the prestigious Mies van der Rohe Award in 2019, Adjunct Professor at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and holds frequent visiting professorships abroad, in 2018 at Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning and from 2021 at Mendrisio Accademia de Architettura, Switzerland. There is even a certain kind of anarchism towards public space. A lack of patronising supervision that creates the notion that we all have a collective,…

As an urban strategist, planner, architect – but most importantly, citizen – I can safely say that Copenhagen is a great place to live and it is where I am at home! It has all the qualities of a great ‘everyday’ city; the scale, high quality public transport, accessible networks of green spaces, an interesting, historic, and dense urban centre, an active waterfront, world leading bicycle facilities and access to daily amenities that mean most citizens live in a ‘15-minute neighbourhood’. So too are its roads ‘relatively’ unclogged by cars, (although we must keep an eye on this!) and there remain distinctive neighbourhoods that welcome different people, with different cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds (although we have to keep an eye on this too!). All in all, Copenhagen lives up to…

The summer of 2020. An unruly one. After a promising June, an unusually cold July fails to deliver warm holidays to the Danes, who have to stay in the country due to Covid restrictions. August proves better. As the pandemic seems to loosen its grip for a while, the sun’s grip tightens during the final weeks of summer, sending the sweating citizens of Copenhagen on drift along the harbor, looking for an open spot to cool their bodies. Any spot will do, as long as it provides access to the water. A manifestation of naval ambitions The opportunity to take a swim in the harbor seems so natural it almost feels like a right, especially to the young urban dwellers, who are raised in the vicinity of numerous harbor baths…

When regarded as physical structures, cities can, in essence, be understood as remodeled landscapes. Through this lens, we can see cities as topographies, terrains, and natural processes, which have been adjusted and altered by human activity and molded into new composed urbanized landscapes. In some cases slowly reshaped through centuries, in other cases drastically transformed in a few years. These human modification processes obviously activates a multitude of material flows. Soil being moved to create building foundations. Stones being laid in patterns to create paved surfaces. Clay being burned and subsequently stacked as bricks to create façades. In ancient towns and cities, these remodeling processes were relatively simple and local, but over the past centuries these processes have become increasingly complex and today, many large cities are built around global…