Skuespilhuset. Photo: Ty Stange.
The smart city of Denmark What makes a ‘smart city’? With the Smart City Summit kicking off in Oman this month, and the Smart to Future Cities conference hitting London in May, Copenhagen has some answers. By Andrew Mellor
Livability and technology collide in the Danish capital – but is that such a coincidence? Copenhagen is never far from the top of worldwide livability rankings, which list the most convenient and enjoyable world cities in which to dwell. But the Danish capital’s unwavering status as an efficient, friendly metropolis has less to do with candles and canals and more to do with good old-fashioned planning. And that is certainly old-fashioned planning. In the early 17th century, King Christian IV of Denmark decided that the burgeoning city should be extended to the south-east with a major new development, Christianshavn – now the thriv90 | Issue 98 | March 2017
ing waterside district just a bridge away from the city centre. Three and a half centuries later, a Copenhagen fearful of missing out on commerce and popularity to Stockholm and Hamburg spawned another entirely new district, Ørestad – part of a master plan that would sow many of the seeds of Copenhagen’s success and efficiency today. Ørestad has only started to flourish in the last decade, but it neatly encapsulates Copenhagen’s attitude to town planning past, present and future. Like Christianshavn, it was conceived with accessibility at its heart (in Christianshavn canals; in Ørestad, Copenhagen’s new
Metro system). But while Ørestad looks impressive on the surface – many of the most creative architects in Europe were engaged to design its buildings, all of them given free reign – it is the more subtle and invisible elements of Ørestad’s concept that shine a light on Copenhagen’s onward quest for efficiency. Given the large number of corporations based in the area, you might wonder why there are so few car parks. The answer is that residents and workers share the same parking facilities in concealed garages; workers use them during the day, vacating them for residents in the evening. The result? Far fewer parking spaces are needed. Ørestad is full of urban planning solutions like this, many of which are tied to environmental ideals – Ørestad’s canals, for example, double up as rainwater res-