Copenhagen, Critically: Notes from the WRLDCTY Fellows Residency

What happens when you gather 25 opinionated urban thinkers in the world’s “most liveable city”? You get a clearer view of what progress really looks like, and how to adapt it to your own backyard.

Last week I had the privilege of joining the WRLDCTY Fellows Residency in Copenhagen thanks to Jasmine Palardy, who, fittingly, was the very first guest when Challenger Cities started. It was a reminder of how far this project has come, and how far I still feel I have to go.

Challenger City TO EP1: Embracing the Challenger City spirit with Jasmine Palardy

I’ll admit, moving from corporate innovation to urban innovation has sometimes made me feel like a bit of an imposter. I’m not an urban planner and I’m not an architect … my work in urbanism has been, at best, scattered. So spending a few days immersed with a group of curious, generous, diverse and experienced people helped me see where I might fit in, and where I might contribute.

Copenhagen was the perfect place to do it too. Here’s a city that pulled itself out of bankruptcy, a declining population and an industrial hangover to become one of the envies of the urban world. It’s a place with enough parallels to the likes of Amsterdam to make you nod knowingly, but not yet so over-referenced that it’s a cliché.

We took a deep dive into Copenhagen’s reinvention story of what worked, what didn’t and what still needs to be solved. Sure, the Economist just crowned it “Most Liveable City”, but no one we met was under any illusions that the job was done. If anything, the humility was refreshing, especially in front of 25 very opinionated types poking at every example we saw!

Part of what makes Copenhagen so compelling is its ability to keep improving incrementally, especially through creative financing: selling off waterfront land to fund public investments like the new(ish) Metro, schools and waterfront amenities. That approach has stitched together a more liveable, inclusive and attractive city. Yet you can still sense the tension as the new waterfront developments sometimes overshadow the city’s more traditional neighbourhoods and urban centre, which doesn’t always get the same love. (There were quite a few jokes about seeing the same photo of kids jumping into the harbour popping up in every slideshow.)

Speaking of that harbour, it really is something. The ability to walk five minutes from your hotel and dive straight into clear water in the middle of the city is a powerful, democratic luxury. Early risers doing their fitness swims, families taking a plunge mid-morning, teens hanging out in the afternoon, it’s a constant, joyful reminder of what urban water can be. When the city is providing the ice bath, as opposed to people creating their own private spas, the community spirit becomes far more uplifting!

We also had the chance to visit some of Denmark’s famous architecture and planning firms. Danish design has become a global export, and seeing Bjarke Ingels Group’s bold work for Bhutan in the same breath as Gehl’s more subtle, human-scale interventions around mobility was a useful reminder: sometimes the big, brash stuff wins headlines, but the smaller moves change lives.

That contrast between spectacular masterplans that you just know will never (and probably shouldn’t) quite land as drawn, with the grounded, adaptable, incremental urban fixes is a theme that keeps coming up in cities. You ultimately need both, and you need to be critical, as well as optimistic, for the big stuff, as well as supportive and the best advocate for the seemingly trivial, but disproportionately impactful.

The group talked a lot about climate resilience, too. Copenhagen got its wake-up call in 2011 when a cloudburst flooded the city. Rather than deny it, they adapted, and keep adapting, to future shocks. There’s more to do, but they’ve built a foundation of resilience that will be crucial for the next chapter.

What struck me was how Copenhagen accepts that it won’t get things perfectly right. Progress here seems to be about becoming more interestingly less wrong over time. I think it’s working, and more importantly, so do they! The population has rebounded to its 1950s levels, and crucially, people stay even after they have kids. There’s a remarkable number of young families, supported by the infrastructure and public realm that makes city living viable. Copenhagen feels like a grown-up city with a young population, a combination North American cities too often miss where the likes of Toronto, Los Angeles or Vancouver can feel like they’re getting older but at a municipal level have a lot of growing up to do.

Of course, put a bunch of opinionated, experienced urbanists together, and you get critical thinking in spades. There was plenty of “that’s amazing… but it’d never fly back home… but maybe this bit of it would.” That’s exactly the value of a residency like this: no one’s trying to clone Copenhagen, but we can pick up practices worth adapting and applying elsewhere in the local context.

That’s the promise of WRLDCTY too, exploring what the world’s next cities could be, in a deeply collaborative way. Bringing people together in a place like Copenhagen, curated by the local experts in BLOXHUB and steered by the likes of Jasmine and Anupam Yog, is a brilliant way to do it. And with the next stop probably being Mumbai, there’s an opportunity to break out of the ‘perfect’ urbanism bubble entirely and embrace some glorious urban messiness.

As someone who’s run my fair share of “innovation vacations” and field trips, it was a treat to be on the other side, to simply be a delegate. I know exactly how hard these gatherings are to pull off, so huge kudos to Jasmine, Anupam and the BLOXHUB team: Jakob, Ann-Brit, and Christoffer.

I’m pretty sure you’ll see many of my fellow Fellows on future Challenger Cities episodes. There’s a lot more to explore, and this experience left me more convinced than ever that the only way to build better cities is to keep showing up, keep learning, and stay just a little bit less wrong each time.

And if this inspired a bit of FOMO, do come hang out at the next WRLDCTY event in Vancouver in October, or become one of the Fellows. I’m sure you’d get a lot out of it, and give something back to this amazing little group too.