Riesgos químicos

Most of the interviewees describe urban development in Copenhagen Metropolian Area during the latest couple of decades as one

dominated by outward urban expansion which to a high extent has taken place in areas poorly served by public transportation. The interviewees almost unanimously talk negatively about this kind of development. The Finger Plan has good intentions, the interviewees seem to agree. However, too much development has taken place outside the fingers, the development of dwellings and workplaces has to a much smaller extent than expected taken place close to the urban rail stations and the plot ratios have not been as high as expected. The city seems to be planned for car driving and new roads are planned for that will be bad for sustainability.

Some of the interviewees talk about the sprawl in the Copenhagen Metropolitan area. For instance, Niels Østergård (Director in The Agency for Spatial and Environmental Planning in the Ministry of the Environment) agrees that Copenhagen has more sprawl than Oslo and Stockholm. He does not know whether this is due to the development of the prices of dwellings in Copenhagen (the workplaces are not spread out in the same way as the dwellings, Østergård says). Especially younger families move to the outskirts of the city and to cities outside Copenhagen Metropolitan area. The reasons, Østergård thinks, are the tradition of living in detached single family houses – which people think is better for families with children – and the much cheaper prices of dwellings outside Copenhagen Metropolitan area. This explanation is also mentioned by Ole Møller (former Chief Secretary and administrative manager in The Transport Council, now Technical Director in the Municipality of Roskilde), Gunna Starck (former City Planning Mayor of Copenhagen Municipality for the Left Wing Socialists) and Peter Hartoft-Nielsen (Planner in The Agency for Spatial and Environmental Planning in the Ministry of the

Environment). In Hartoft-Nielsen’s opinion, the newly built detached single family houses take up quite some land and even the

development of row houses and terraced houses has not been as dense as it could.

Whether ’Suburbia’ is detrimental to sustainability aims is in no way an issue in the current debate, Starck states. In the 1990s building detached single family houses was not discussed with regards to environmental sustainability. Nor is it now. The discussion normally takes as its point of departure the nature of these neighborhoods,

Starck says. Starck, on her side, talks more about the social

sustainability in Copenhagen. She thinks the big apartment building projects in for instance Ishøj and Mjølnerparken were mistakes because they contain only residents and no business life. These residential areas thus turned into ghettoes.

According to Jens Ole Nielsen (Director in The Centre for Urban Design, Municipality of Copenhagen), until 5-7 years ago more building stock was built for business than for housing (perhaps 200,000 m2 for business and 100,000 for housing). Too few dwellings have been built in regard to the demand, Nielsen says.

Hans Ege Jørgensen, (Planner in MOVIA, the Copenhagen Metropolitan Area Public Transport Authority) talks about how equality ideals were high on the agenda during the 1970s and 1980s. The state wanted to develop different parts of the country ‘fairly’ which in some places resulted in sprawl. Such decentralizing ideas have even longer traditions. The idea of the Finger Plan (which was first adopted in 1947) was originally to move dwellings out of the inner city, Nielsen states. For a long time it was important for the state to move people from the inner city. For example, in the 1970s the state wanted the plot ratio in these areas to be only 110 (between one third and half of what it had been even earlier). Thus the state used to not support densification.

The state also wanted decentralization of workplaces in order to move the workplaces to the places where people lived. According to Jens Kramer Mikkelsen (Director of ‘CPH City & Port Development’ and former Lord Mayor of Copenhagen Municipality), this was romantic and misconceived and a thing which cannot be realized in a modern capitalist society. Nielsen gives an example of how this

decentralization led to a higher amount of transport in private cars: 10% of the employees at the insurance company Baltica, which moved to Ballerup, bought a car during the first 9 months after the moving. This experience was one of the things leading to the

development of the principle of locating close to urban rail stations in the Finger Plan, Nielsen says.

More interviewees say that the principles of the Finger Plan have not been followed with consequence (Ege Jørgensen, Nielsen, Hartoft- Nielsen, Kramer Mikkelsen). Nielsen describes how the

decentralization of workplaces to areas close to urban rail stations failed. Almost no workplaces were located close to the urban rail stations, Nielsen says, as these areas were filled up with dwellings. Thus the development of new workplaces outside the inner city could

not observe the principle of locating close to the urban rail stations. First the industry was located far from the stations, then also the office buildings. Thus the decentralization of workplaces meant car

dependency.

Hartoft-Nielsen also states that the metropolitan urban structure is very car dependent. The counties around Copenhagen have failed to administer the principle of locating close to urban rail stations properly. Sprawl has developed as there has been much development outside the fingers and not enough political will to control it. Møller notes how a lot of the urban development takes place in isolation. A single municipality or a single land owner takes land into use and develops new dwellings or workplace premises without talking to anyone who will develop infrastructure – and according to Møller this results in sprawl. Møller also states that the principle of locating close to urban rail stations was earlier interpreted in a rather liberal way. He thinks, however, that this has now been stopped. According to Møller, Roskilde has observed the Finger Plan rather strictly. Roskilde is now trying, in cooperation with the Ministry of the Environment, to extend the Roskilde-finger.

Ege Jørgensen and Nielsen also doubt that the Finger Plan has resulted in a more sustainable city. The plan makes Copenhagen a very open city with long distances which almost makes it the opposite of sustainable, Ege Jørgensen says. The fingers have grown to become 30-50 kilometers. Concentrating the building stock close to the stations gives a high public transport rate, Ege Jørgensen says. On the other hand, following the Finger Plan has resulted in very large distances and problems with covering the city with public transport services. Ivan Lund Pedersen (NOAH (Danish member of Friends of the Earth), Traffic group) thinks that the principle of building close to urban rail stations is sympathetic but says that most of the

development during the last 20-30 years has not respected the principle. Figures presented in the Finger Plan 2007 show how problematic the development has been. According to Hartoft-Nielsen, only 40 % of new office workplace building stock constructed since 1990 outside the central municipalities (Copenhagen and

Frederiksberg) has been located close to urban rail stations. However, more than one half of the construction of office buildings has taken place in the two central municipalities, most of which close to stations.

Kramer Mikkelsen also agrees that unsustainable decisions might have been taken in terms of locating transport-intensive businesses in the

wrong places (businesses requiring heavy loads of goods situated in the inner city or office buildings situated in the suburbs).

Nilsen describes how The Greater Copenhagen Council allowed for workplaces to be situated in the suburbs which led to a ’workplace surplus’ with distant location and a ’workplace deficit’ in the city. Nielsen says this meant more traffic lines between the fingers and transport patterns that could not be covered by public transport services. This again has led to more car traffic and congestion. According to Ege Jørgensen, many office buildings have been built along the expanded Helsingør motorway without giving a thought to the public transport services in that area. In Sydhavnen (where for instance Ericsson and Nokia are located) there is no urban rail station but lots of parking space and easy connection to the motorway. Thus, according to Nielsen, the transport patterns in Sydhavnen are less sustainable than in the inner city but still more sustainable than further out in the region.

As shown above, the interviewees give a quite coherent picture of a metropolitan area where outward urban expansion has been the dominant trend. In Denmark, the issue of densification was put on the agenda quite late compared to other countries, Møller says. The interviewees are also quite unanimous in their view that this has been a transport-wise unfavorable development. However, several

interviewees also say that the outward expansion has been, at least to some extent, counterweighed by inner-city densification during the more recent years.

According to Nielsen, the new national goal of promoting growth in Copenhagen in order to strengthen Denmark’s international

competitive power has made it easier for the planners in Copenhagen to propose high-density development. For the first time it is now possible to set standards for plot ratio, amounts of open space, sunlight conditions, parking provision etc. adapted to high-density development. Five years ago, Nielsen says, these standards could not have been set.

Ege Jørgensen as well as Kramer Mikkelsen Østergård and Bente Frost (the latter a former Mayor of Building and Techniques for Denmark’s Liberal Party in the Municipality of Copenhagen) describe how Copenhagen and other cities are currently being densified. Ege Jørgensen says that this is due to changed priorities in planning, but also has to do with the newest trends where cities should look like cities. This means that the inner parts of the Municipality of Copenhagen have started growing again. Harbor areas and former

industrial areas are being developed, residences are built and the numbers of citizens and workplaces are rising. People have begun to see the big cities as locomotives, Ege Jørgensen says, ’drawing their countries forward’. The drawback of this is if these ‘locomotive’ cities are developed on conditions which mostly benefit business life – for instance if citizens are being ‘pushed out’ of the city to make way for shops and parking space, which is what for instance Starck says is happening in Copenhagen. Starck is especially interested in social sustainability in the sense of equality and in her opinion the municipality has not been fair to people who are not wealthy.

Copenhagen has become too expensive for ordinary people to live in – and the social life is based on the idea of a so-called ’party zone’, Starck says, with almost non-stop amusement for citizens and tourists. The municipality also uses the phrases ‘sustainability’ and ‘green’ when they talk about letting people with jobs move into apartments in the publicly run building stock even though unemployed persons are first in line, Starck says. She also thinks that too few of the traffic areas in Copenhagen (parking lots and excessively wide roads) have been transformed to, for instance, recreational areas.

Jan Christiansen (City Architect of the Municipality of Copenhagen) and Kramer Mikkelsen seem to be quite proud of Ørestaden (the new neighbourhood on Amager which has been planned and developed with much regard to sustainability). As Kramer Mikkelsen is the director of the project organization developing Ørestaden and Christiansen is the City Architect this is of course not especially surprising. First the Metro stations were built and then the building stock was situated very close to the stations, they say. According to Christiansen, Ørestaden is very dense and few parking lots have been built here. Kramer Mikkelsen adds to this that the parking space per square meter of floor area is quite small, forcing people to use the public transport services instead of the car. The ’City and Port Development’ is responsible for the parking space development and have from the beginning taken care that people do not get used to driving to and from Ørestaden, Kramer Mikkelsen says. Also Hartoft- Nielsen mentions Ørestaden as a positive example of a reasonable modal split and adds to this that the public transport services in the area are good.

Only two interviewees talk about locating shopping-, service and leisure facilities. Birgitte Henriksen (Project Manager in the Danish Road Directorate) describes how the metro in Ørestaden was built before the residential buildings, which was a reasonable decision. Then, however, the politicians allowed a big shopping center, Fields, to be built (many times bigger than originally allowed in the

legislation), the nearby motorway became crowded and more slip roads were built.

Nielsen talks about how maintaining small and middle-sized shops in the city is important for the city life and thus for minimizing transport. The shopping centers in the suburbs have taken away shoppers from the inner city. On the other hand, the two big shopping centers in the inner city might have brought them back, Nielsen says. Another possibility is that the many shopping centers altogether have made people go further in order to do their shopping.

Some of the Copenhagen interviewees talk about how the very planning of spatial development in the Copenhagen Metropolitan area has led quite an unsettled life and how long-term planning has not been on the agenda. The Greater Copenhagen Council was closed down in 1989. Then the regional planning was managed by Copenhagen, Frederiksborg and Roskilde counties and the municipalities of Copenhagen and Frederiksberg and then

‘Hovedstadens Udvikling Råd’ (Greater Copenhagen Authority) was reintroduced in 2001. Later the same year, a new liberal-conservative government gained power. The principle of locating workplaces and housing close to urban rail stations was then weakened and new limits were introduced. Now new building stock could be placed further than 1000 meters from an urban rail station. Recently the regional planning has been moved partly to state level and partly to the new regional council.

According to Østergård, the unsettled planning has resulted in haphazardness as to road building and improvements on the rail system and a lack of public debate in connection with decisions about development. Henriksen states how the Municipality of Copenhagen has sometimes planned for residential areas without enough regard to the transport infrastructure. Henriksen as well as Ege Jørgensen emphasize that one should coordinate the planning for land use and transport. This has been done in Køge Bugt and in Ørestaden. On the contrary, the building stock in Nordhavnen has been planned very quickly and without enough consideration for transport in this area. The municipality has forced the building process because the revenues from selling land in Nordhavnen are paying the next part of the Metro. The harbor area, which is for the time being developed with new residential areas, has therefore become the most recent example of an area where Henriksen is not sure the infrastructure will be developed successfully.

Summarizing: All in all, and in spite of positive development in some areas during the latest years, the Copenhagen interviewees draw a picture of a city where several things have worked and are working against a more sustainable development. Parts of the Finger Plan have either functioned or been interpreted in a way that has resulted in a higher use of private cars. Congestion is taking place on the motorways to the city. For years decentralization has taken place instead of centralization and densification. No one authority has had the power to create and defend plans for a more sustainable