How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark (13 page)

He thinks that part of the problem in other countries is that cycling is promoted using eco-arguments, or through the creation of a geeky cycling subculture. “The bicycle advocates, the avid cyclists,” he says, “they’re a sub-culture. And the nature of subcultures is that you want other people to share your hobby. Whether you’re a bowler or a synchronised swimmer, you’ve got to understand my love of it, and you’ve got to copy it. If you don’t, then you’re not really a cyclist. You can’t just ride the old Raleigh that you found in your grandmother’s old house in Bournemouth. You’ve got to have the right bike – otherwise it’s not real.” Copenhageners, on the other hand, just use bikes to get around town. According to government surveys, half of them say they cycle simply because it’s fast. Only a third cycle because it’s healthy. They cycle to live, but they don’t live to cycle.

Not so long ago, though, most of them didn’t do either. In the economic boom following the Second World War, everyone bought cars, and there were plans to eliminate cycling as a mode of transport, and to make the roads as
suitable as possible for motoring. The last tram in Copenhagen went out of service in 1972, and only one in ten commuters went by bike. There’s a famous picture from 1980 of Nyhavn, the pastel-coloured wharf in central Copenhagen that is now one of the most popular spots in the city. Today, it is pedestrianised and lined with cafés and boats. In 1980, it was essentially one big car park.

“Why not?” says a man called Jan Gehl, dripping with sarcasm. “It’s the perfect parking space. The cars have a great view from there.”

Gehl is the godfather of Copenhagen’s open-plan streets, and perhaps the patron saint of cyclists worldwide. Throughout 1962, Gehl – then a young architecture student – spent one day every week sitting on a street called Strøget. It’s pronounced a bit like “stroll” – fittingly so, because it was the first pedestrianised high street in Europe. At 3.2 kilometres long, it remains the longest. Gehl was concerned at the way Copenhagen’s Modernist urban planners were eating away at cycling lanes, and at public space. He was convinced that public spaces that encouraged interaction were the secret to both a happy city and the Danish concept of cooperation – but he needed some data to back him up. At the time, there was none.

“Nothing was known,” Gehl says in this magical voice that has the same reassuring effect on cyclists that Dumbledore has on Hogwarts. “People had never been the subject of study in cities, ever. It was taken for granted that people moved about in public spaces. It was only when the
traffic started to pressurise life, and when the Modernist planners started to discourage the use of space between buildings that we realised there was a need for research.”

And that was why Gehl, notepad in hand, could be found every week in 1962, strolling up and down Strøget. “This was some of the pioneering stuff,” Gehl says, proudly tapping
Life Between Buildings
, one of the many books that came out of the research. “Sitting there, watching people. Finding out: what is a day like? What is a week like? What is a year like? What is the difference between summer, autumn, winter? What happens when there is a festival? A fire? The queen’s birthday? We had to collect all the basics about human behaviour in public spaces. How you kiss and how you walk, dance – whatever you do in cities, where you do it, how you do it.”

Over time, Gehl’s research – which soon spread to other cities – became more and more influential. “We have been able to show that the more square metres you pedestrianise, the more people will use the city. It’s good for democracy and good for inclusion that we mingle in the public space. It’s good for your health, and good for the environment.”

In Copenhagen, more and more cycle lanes were reintroduced, and pedestrianisation spread to the streets around Strøget – to the extent that today, Copenhagen’s centre is one of the most relaxing city centres I’ve been to. It makes you wish that someone would do something similar to the cesspit around Leicester Square.

Across one whole wall in Gehl’s office is a vast streetmap
of San Francisco, one of the cities he is currently advising. Along one long strip of road, he has drawn a box and labelled it “living room”. It sums up his ideology, and, in fact, the ethos of Copenhagen: the city as one big sofa.

But the transition wasn’t all down to Gehl. “I have done nothing in the city,” he says, very modestly. “There’s a widespread rumour that the pedestrianisation is because of me. No. I used the pedestrianisation as a laboratory for my studies. But then we can see a very interesting dialogue between university and town hall. Our studies encouraged them enormously to do more projects. The mayor even wrote to me to say: ‘If you hadn’t done those studies, we politicians would not have dared to make Copenhagen what it is today.’ ” Gehl’s eyes twinkle. “I like that.”

Gehl admits the mentality is born as much from necessity as idealism. On a white sheet of paper, he draws me a timeline which is now stuck up on my wall at home, and on it he underlines the year 1973 several times. “The oil crisis,” he says, referring to the year that the petrol producers in the Arab world stopped exporting oil in protest at the West’s support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Denmark was particularly badly hit, and even though they later found oil in the North Sea, it made Danes fearful of ever being so reliant on fossil fuel and, by extension, cars. It helps explain why Denmark now makes just under half the world’s wind turbines, and why Copenhagen turned, once again, to cycling.

“We started to have car-free days. Not because of a love
of mankind, but because of a lack of petroleum. Everybody rejoiced because it was wonderful having car-free Sundays. And they realised it would be clever to go back to bicycles.”

The mentality stuck. By 2025 it aims to be the world’s first carbon-neutral capital. Along with a third of his fellow Copenhageners, Jan Gehl – 76 years young – still cycles to work. And year after year, Copenhagen is named as one of the world’s most livable cities.

There’s a reason for that – lots of them, in fact. Copenhagen’s big enough to house several distinct districts (Indre By, the shopping district in the middle; suburban Amager to the east; hip Vesterbro in the south-west, nestling below multicultural Nørrebro; and then Østerbro, Denmark’s answer to Notting Hill) but small enough to cross it in 20 minutes – on a bike, naturally. The streets are wide and lined with graceful rococo houses and there’s rarely a crap building in site. There’s a beach within striking distance, a huge outdoor swimming pool in the middle of the harbour, or if you just want to sit, rather than take a dip, you can pop along to Christiania, the 40-year-old anarchist commune that jostles against the lake in Christianshavn.

Culturally, the city is buzzing. As explored in Chapter two, Copenhagen is where the world’s foodies currently go to eat. Its television studios are the home of Danish noir. In Bjarke Ingels, it has spawned the starchitect of the moment. In Distortion – essentially a mobile rave that tours the city’s districts each year in June – it has one of northern Europe’s
most unusual music festivals. Vesterbro is a sort of Shoreditch-lite, with new bars and galleries sprouting all the time. Copenhagen has the second-biggest homes in Europe – and they’re are almost all heated and cooled from a central hub (rather than on an individual basis), which has resulted in a 70% reduction in carbon emissions.

Twenty-five years ago, this would have been hard to imagine. “Copenhagen was nearly bankrupt,” remembers the city’s head of planning, Anne Skovbro, whose offices are in the same city hall that features prominently in the first series of
The Killing
. (Skovbro’s claim to fame: her leg features in one of the shots.) “We were an old industrial harbour city that had lost most of its industry to Jutland and China.”

Unemployment was high, infrastructure was failing, the housing system was in crisis, and welfare costs had spiralled. Urban renewal was urgently needed – and there was a consensus at government level that if it was to be done at all, it needed to be done properly. So the state bailed out the city – and it was then, in the late 80s and early 90s, that Copenhagen really got going.

“We had to ensure this change from an old industrial city, with a lot of brown-field sites,” says Skovbro, “to an efficient, knowledge-based city with new housing development and a sustainable infrastructure.”

The beginnings of a subway system were set in motion. New neighbourhoods to the north and south of the city were planned – and they’re now reaching completion.
Further investment was put into cycling lanes, and more green spaces were created. Flats were knocked together to create bigger living spaces, and three new architectural jewels were built at strategic intervals along the waterfront – a new opera house, a national library and a theatre. And to pay for all this, the city sold off large tracts of land to the south of the city at Ørestad, in a Faustian pact that has seen the emergence of a very un-Danish, neo-Ballardian development on the city’s southern fringes. But more on that later.

The urban revival came hand in hand with a cultural one. Most obviously, there were the Dogme film-makers – Lars von Trier and Thomas Winterberg are the most successful – and then there were the art dealers. Copenhagen’s National Gallery and Humlebaek’s Louisiana Gallery had long housed impressive collections, but there were very few commercial galleries. In the late 80s, Mikael Andersen was one of the first Copenhageners to establish one.

“It was difficult. Copenhagen was very provincial 25 years ago,” he remembers. “We didn’t have a gallery system. At the time, artists would show their work at an institution every year, as a group. We live in a very social democratic society, and people were suspicious of commercial art. They thought commercial galleries were just trying to get money out of artists.”

And when he opened his space in Bredgade, only a mile from Strøget, people scoffed at him for straying so far – as they saw it – from the centre. But Andersen had the last
laugh. There are now ten galleries within 100 metres of his, and at the private view I attend, there are collectors from all over the world. These days, though, the trendiest galleries are on the other side of town, not far from the former red- light district in Vesterbro. What’s happened here mirrors what’s happened in Copenhagen over the past two decades: Vesterbro has been transformed from a gritty, working-class neighbourhood into the place where all the cool crowd hang out. The centre of this transition has been the old meatpacking district, which still functions as such today, but now also houses an array of bars, galleries, cafes and clubs. If you turn up there at four in the morning, you’ll see clubbers tottering home to sleep, and butchers rolling up their shutters to start the working day. It’s a meat market in more ways than one.

I’m A Kombo, the pop-up chefs in Chapter two, have their kitchen there. A few metres away, there’s the Karriere bar, founded by the artist Jeppe Hein – whose work was shown at the Hayward Gallery in 2012 – and his sister Laerke. Once one of the hottest joints in town, it’s crammed with furniture designed by Hein’s artist friends – Carsten Holler, Dan Graham and Olafur Eliasson among them. Hein built the bar itself, which drifts very slowly sideways as the night goes on. If you don’t keep an eye out, your drink will end up half a metre north of where you left it.

Coming to a place like Karriere, you realise how Copenhagen could have become so hip, so quick: everyone knows each other, and many of them share a camaraderie
that helps speed up change. Next door to the bar is the V1 Gallery, run by the Heins’ friend Jesper Elg. Tonight, Elg’s holding a party for a new show. If he’s in town, the architect Bjarke Ingels will probably be there. As the night wears on, Trentemøller, the DJ whose work can be heard in the latest Almodóvar film, will spin a few tracks. When Trentemøller goes on tour, he’ll be joined on the drums by the fashion designer Henrik Vibskov, who – wait for it – knows Elg from their art school days in London in the late 90s. To round off the set, there’s Thomas Fleurquin, busily finalising preparations for this year’s Distortion festival, a week
that’ll see 130,000 ravers engage in activities that – in a blog titled “Distortion and the Decline of Civilisation” – the right-wing broadsheet
Jyllands-Posten
will later label: “infernal noise, senseless drinking, vomit, piss, fornication, and – above all – destruction.”

It’s an article that neatly encapsulates Denmark’s contradictions. Denmark is at once a deeply conservative place and a very tolerant one. It spawned the Muhammed cartoons in 2006 – and yet in 1989 it was the first country to legalise same-sex partnerships. It’s a dichotomy further illustrated by two demonstrations that snaked past city hall on consecutive weeks in May. The first highlighted Denmark’s darker side – a protest at Denmark’s harsh treatment of asylum seekers. The second was a march in celebration of marijuana that followed a float of dreadlocked reggae singers all the way to Christiania, the military base turned semi-autonomous anarchist commune. Home to 850 Christianites, as well as several bars, shops and meditation rooms, Christiania has long housed an open drugs trade to which the authorities turn a blind eye. It’s a place of great symbolic importance to the hippies of Europe. If the government ever did seriously try to smash it, one local claims, every stoner on the continent would come to defend it.