<
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/dec/10/the-five-minute-city-inside-denmarks-revolutionary-neighbourhood>
"It’s not often that the worlds of town planning and traffic management become
mired in controversy, but in recent years the innocuous concept of the
“15-minute city” has sparked outrage in online forums, among cynical
politicians and on the streets of British cities such as Oxford. The originator
of the concept, urban planner Carlos Moreno, has even received death threats.
All of this has hinged on the spurious conspiracy theory that 15-minute cities
were part of some shady global population-control agenda, rather than a desire
to simply create more pleasant neighbourhoods.
If the concept of having all your basic amenities within 15 minutes’ distance
was enough to provoke such hostility, what would the conspiracy theorists make
of a five-minute city? Fortunately, they have failed to notice that Denmark has
already built such a place: Nordhavn, an emerging new neighbourhood of
Copenhagen. If they visited today they might be disappointed, or perhaps
converted.
You could possibly see Nordhavn as some sort of new-world-order dystopia, where
people are only pretending to be happy because they are being brainwashed by
the 5G towers, or something. But a more likely explanation is that this is what
city-making looks like when you get everything right: human-scaled,
pedestrian-friendly, architecturally diverse, environmentally standard-setting,
lots of waterfront. A place people are happy to hang around, even on a chilly
winter’s day: shopping, cycling, walking their dogs, jogging, even cold-water
swimming at the public beach. It does feel pretty quiet here, but that’s not
because there are no people; it’s because there are hardly any cars – and those
that do glide by are electric.
This is the real underpinning of the five-minute city concept. “Cars are not
welcome here,” says Lars Riemann of the planning consultants Ramboll, which won
the competition to design Nordhavn in 2008, along with the architects Cobe and
Sleth and other partners. Nordhavn was a former industrial landscape: a 2 sq km
peninsula to the north-east of the city centre that operated as a freeport for
more than a century. But with Copenhagen’s population and popularity on the
rise, the city decided to redevelop these docklands, providing homes for 40,000
people and workplaces for another 40,000 over the next 40 years. Today,
Nordhavn’s population is about 6,000.
“If you go back in time, when you did city planning, you would say: ‘Where do
the roads go? How do the cars get from A to B?’ That was your main priority,”
says Riemann. “Then we’d put bike lanes next to the roads, pedestrian areas
next to that and so on. Here, we did the opposite. We said: ‘What does a
walkable city look like? What do the streets look like? What do people like to
experience as they are walking?’” Transport-wise, they started with a new metro
line, then cycle routes. “At the end, it was like: ‘OK, so now that we have all
this infrastructure for walking, biking and public transit, is there still some
room for cars?’”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
