Place: Copenhagen Region, Denmark
Team: MASU Planning
Client: Arkitektforeningen with economic support from Dreyers Fond
Size: 3.000km2
Timeline: 2nd prize, 2025
Fingerplan 2.0
By prioritizing green & blue corridors, we propose a resilient, climate-adapted strategy where nature, biodiversity and social equity can thrive in harmony.
Vision for a Green & Blue Landscape-first Strategy:
5 Great Parks — 1 DreamThe open landscape of the capital region cannot be the left over from planning bureaucrats! Everyone dreams of open nature and wilderness, yet, the reality is fragmented, poorly accessible and sorely lacks the bold identity of great nature parks! Let’s develop a Park strategy for the capital region, let’s give substance and identity to the landscape that makes us dream but is the most vulnerable to today’s urban sprawl! Denmark has a goal of 25% of its land to be covered by forest by 2100, what a better location than next to where people live? Based on the existing forest covers, wetlands, topography and ice age geology; the ‘natural’ landscape of the capital region will unite in a collection of 5 national parks. Copenhagen won’t be jealous of its Nordic neighbors anymore and will offer the right to roam in picturesque nature. The right to cut loose from the urban world on a true territorial scale! The region’s nature will finally be put back on its pedestal while supporting the recreational offerings a capital city deserves!
Copenhagen’s Rurban constellation
The Finger Plan tricked us, and our beliefs made the vast horizontal metropolis of today, a Città diffusa extending even beyond Greater Copenhagen. These sub-urban and peri urban areas can only exist today as the subordinates of the Capital city, prisoners to exponential car traffic!
Firstly, the establishment of a Net-zero urbanization policy is imperative. No more sprawl on bare land! Secondly, let’s offer every form of urban structure of the capital region a raison d’être (purpose) through a new paradigm of isotropy. Fostering interconnections between all satellite towns and villages, assembled into one mesh, of more compact and vibrant urban centers! This ‘ecological-desakota’ supports decentralized movement patterns, reducing the stress on infrastructure, ultimately generating a lace of soft mobility patterns over the entire region! Simultaneously providing services and social interactions through the development of its microcenters. The dream for the eco-urbans who cannot afford the city anymore!
Green fringes & the Chain of Parks
The greater Copenhagen and its sub urban areas are in a situation of status quo, fueling grave segregation and the unstoppable rise of downtown housing prices! The greater Copenhagen area needs its own vision to break the status quo and lead the way to spatial justice! What if landscape was the super boost capable of such complex task?
Through the creation of a Chain of Parks, Copenhagen’s suburbs can now find their identity and take on the responsibility of the compact, 15min city. Here, we are not talking of the so called ‘grønne kiler’, the unformal green soup of unclaimed nature – a space lacerated by infrastructure. But an immanent landscape, aesthetically pleasing to the soul, it is a place to see, meet, swim, exercise, love and relax. It will mean the creation of landscapes that make Copenhagen suburbs significantly more meaningful, valuable, and livable. Even attracting tourists and hipsters alike!
Moreover, the chain of parks will connect to the green fringes of the National Parks and ensure ecological continuity across the area.
Recycling Copenhagen
After introducing a Net-zero urbanization policy we must see Copenhagen as a ‘renewable resource’. Let’s tap into it!
The future ring 3 light rail along with the chain of parks, provides the ideal framework for transformation and densification of large industrial and residential areas. Relying on existing and future stations, today’s uniform suburb, will become a constellation of 5-minute neighborhoods with diversity (functions, typologies, services, incomes, etc.) at their core. They will be sustained by policies enforcing a minimum of social housing, senior housing, or alternative form of housing among others, governed at the regional scale, ensuring a global coherence. Not only promoting the compact city but the balanced city as well. Moreover, all main roads/motorways entering the city, will mutate into green mobility boulevards from the Ring 3 and inward. These future linear mobility parks - the length of today’s average bike rides on the Supercyklestier - are the only way forward in keeping the city livable and just, as we face the growing challenges of noise and air pollution.
Let’s be realistic and surrender!
Copenhagen’s Finger plan 2.0 is calling for a new long-term vision, it is too late for a naïve resistance and a patch-like strategy!
Let’s surrender and celebrate, let sea level rise or cloudbursts turn Copenhagen into an archipelago. Use coastal adaptation to create new coastal parks, cloudburst to make all roofs green and all streets blue. Re-open ‘rivers’ where the ground water is high or when transforming former industrial areas. Let’s penetrate the ‘parliament of things’, stop digging pipes and make the city a sponge. After all, dragonflies don’t live in pipes!
As the climate transforms the city’s relationship to water, we must celebrate Copenhagen as a port-city! New industrial/logistic areas should be located on the sea, promoting sustainable short distribution channels with the city, its customers, or the airport. Rather than harmful landfills, new stilt like frameworks will work hand in hand with future coastal landscape adaptation nature reefs as well as providing new opportunities for celebrating the city’s identity through a myriad of new sea pools, saunas, marinas, sailing clubs, etc.