It's Time to Denmark-ify Our Cities: A Copenhagen Case Study

by Brian Merchant

from: http://www.treehugger.com/

Photo: Mik Hartwell via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY

If we're going to consider trying to Denmark-ify societies around the world, perhaps the first thing we should do is make sure that people would actually want to live in those societies. So let's take a closer look at Denmark's capital, Copenhagen. Along with being the most populous city in the nation (the greater metropolitan area is home to just under 2 million people), it's the political, commercial, and cultural hub as well.

And if you're a regular Treehugger reader, you're probably aware that it's one of the most highly regarded 'green' cities in the world -- and consistently ranked as among the most livable. Here's why:

First of all, it's perhaps the bike-friendliest city on the planet. A well-designed network of bike lanes and ample municipal support has enabled huge swaths of the population to take up on the bicycle as their main form of transportation. Half of Copenhagen residents own bikes, and 40% use them to commute to work.

And that's not just an overly rosy stat offered up by the city's PR team. Step out onto any major thoroughfare, and you'll see Danes of every stripe cruising by: businessmen decked out in suits, mothers carting their adorable Scandinavian children, older folks, kids -- everyone bikes in Copenhagen. No wonder cities as far away as Portland are looking to its example to increase bike ridership.

Secondly, there are ample public squares and green spaces, and the canal than runs through the city center is kept clean enough to swim in. Much of the city is walkable, and the main commercial district is largely pedestrian-only. Copenhagen is also in the process of expanding its popular metro system, so that it might reach further out from the urban area.

Photo: Poom! via Flickr/CC BY

The city is on track to be carbon neutral by 2025. It's in the process of phasing out its coal-fired power plants, which currently generate most of the city's power. The first will be gone within five years, and upgraded to run on biomass. Each of the plants are already outfitted to efficiently capture the heat generated in the coal-burning process, and enable Copenhagen to residents to enjoy an advance district heating system.

Strict energy efficiency codes ensure that new buildings won't waste power, and the progressive taxation rate (yup, Copenhagen residents, like all Danes, pay loads more taxes than you do) provides ample funding for city projects -- Jorgen Abildgaard, the city's Executive Climate Project Director, manager says the budget is balanced, despite this smorgasbord of initiatives.

And what's on the way? Here's Abildgaard:

Bike lanes that extend even further out, into the suburbs. 'Payment zones' for non-electric vehicles, to discourage driving. The city wouldn't mind seeming them go altogether. An expanded metro. Further efforts to revitalize waterside parks.

In my eyes, the only thing that keeps Copenhagen from being a truly replicable model for green cities is its relative lack of density -- the city's building codes prevent any structure from being more than six stories high, and only some 600,000 people live in the city's urban center. That's great here -- city planners project only an additional 100,000 residents over the next ten years.

But in a world increasingly crammed with megacities, the question will be whether the green initiatives can be scaled up without losing the livability we see here in Copenhagen.

Certainly, the core principles that make the city work can and should be adopted around the globe, but that's stuff we've been shouting about for years: Good public transit, interesting public spaces, strong bike-ability, energy efficiency, and so forth. The trick is doing all this stuff either a) with less funding or b) by convincing residents that it's worth ponying up more tax dollars for.

To me, the answer is clear -- if sacrificing some income means the place I live will be cleaner, healthier, and awesomer (not to mention more sustainable and more equal), show me where to sign. But there are a tangle of cultural and political obstacles preventing such an attitude from taking root in much of the world (the wealthy's keen interest in protecting their wealth chief among them). I'll look at some of these later in this series.

For now, allow me to heartily recommend that urban planners take a good hard look at Copenhagen. Your fellow residents will thank you.

More on how we might Denmark-ify societies 'round the world:

Denmark to say 'Goodbye' to Fossil Fuels by 2050 (Video)

Could Denmark-ifying the World Stop Climate Change?

Life in Denmark's Super-Low Energy Suburb, Stenlose South

The Truly Innovative Oresund Bridge (Oresundsbron) Designed to Connect Sweden and Denmark

From: http://www.vivaboo.com/

Stretching across the Oresund Straight is the truly innovative 7,845 meter (25,738 foot) Oresund Bridge or as it’s locally referred to, the Oresundsbron. For locals or tourists looking to travel between Malmo, Sweden and Copenhagen, Denmark, without having to fly, the Oresund Bridge is the route to take.

Image By supermaskinen

But the Oresund Bridge is more than your typical bridge, it is a 4-lane highway as well as a 2-track railway. Every day thousands and thousands of vehicles cross the bridge. Between the vehicles and the trains that travel across the bridge, it is estimated 30-35 million people travel this route every year.

The Oresund Bridge is reportedly the longest road and rail bridge in all of Europe. Interestingly enough, part of the Oresund Bridge crossing is actually a tunnel and man-made island. So needless to say, quite a bit of construction and architectural masterminding was required to built the Oresund Bridge.

After about five years of construction the bridge finally opened mid-2000. On the Danish side, vehicles go through a 4 km (2.5 mile) tunnel and emerge from the tunnel to the man-made island at which point they are now at bridge level as they continue over to Sweden.

You may wonder why the bridge wasn’t built the same on both sides. Well, per reports, the bridge was built with the additional tunnel and island features so it would not interrupt air traffic at the nearby airport nor shipping traffic coming through the straight in either good or bad weather.

Image By Kristian M

Image By kajvin

Image By kajvin

Image By Håkan Dahlström

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Image By Samad Jee (Mirza Ghaalib MODE)

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10 best biking cities in Europe

By Tyler Falk

From http://www.smartplanet.com/

While biking is becoming more popular in U.S. cities — L.A. is adding 1,600 bike lanes, Chicago has a new bike plan, and Portland has 17,000 daily commuters — Europe has some amazing biking cities of their own.
The Ecologist has come up with the 10 best biking cities in Europe (in no particular order):

-Lyon, France

• “With its charming twisty lanes and dedicated bike routes, Lyon is a cyclists’ paradise.”
• The city’s bike sharing program, Velo’v has over 300 stations throughout the city.

-Rome, Italy

• “Cycling is by far the best bet for seeing the sights close to the Tiber, where a picturesque route runs from the Ponte Sublicio to the Ponte della Magliana.”

-Basel, Switzerland

• “Featuring street lanes geared to cyclists and dedicated left hand turns to make crossing the road safer, Basel tops the list of cities to cycle in Switzerland.”

-Berlin, Germany

• “Thanks to the combined efforts of Allied air raids and the Communist predilection for destroying picturesque old buildings and replacing them with big, brash new ones, Berlin’s streets are wonderfully wide, which makes it easy to get around by bike.”

-Trondheim, Norway

• “With its picturesque setting on the shores of the cerulean Trondheimsfjord, Norway’s fourth largest city has built a reputation for bicycling brilliance thanks to innovations such as the Trampe bicycle lift which takes the effort out of pedaling uphill.”

-Paris, France

• “While the many hazards of the Place de la Concorde aren’t the greatest advertisement for cycling in Paris, once you’re a safe distance from the city’s infamously crazy drivers – on the pavement in other words – then cycling in Paris can be a real pleasure.”

-Barcelona, Spain

• “Surprisingly, given Spain’s reputation for endangering the lives and limbs of cyclists thanks to its motorists’ penchant for going everywhere at top speed, Barcelona has 50,000 regular cyclists and that figure is increasing daily.”

-Copenhagen, Denmark

• 37 percent of all Copenhageners bike a total of 1.2 million kilometers each day.
• “The Danish capital has been quietly turning itself into one of the best biking cities in the world; a fact revealed when the International Cycling Union gave it the first ‘Bike City’ award last year.”

-London, England

• The city is working to build 12 biking “superhighways” — there are already two — and increase biking by 400 percent from 2000.
• “Cycling in London used to be pretty dreadful thanks to an unfortunate combination of rain and aggressive drivers but since the first two Barclays Cycle Superhighways launched last summer, things have become a little easier.”

-Amsterdam, Netherlands

• There are 600,000 bikes in a city of 750,000.
• “Thanks in part to the narrow streets in the medieval city center, cycling is by far the most efficient way to get around.”

Watch this inspiring video of Amsterdam’s biking community:

LEGO: the building blocks to success

Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, CEO, LEGO
From: http://meettheboss.tv/

Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, CEO of Lego has redefined the Danish toymaker. This is how he built the foundations for better leadership.

A traditional family business had always been at the heart of Lego; but by the time current CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp – the first man outside of the founding family to head the company – came onto the scene, the model was no longer working.

The Lego Group began its life in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter from Billund in Denmark, who began making wooden toys in 1932. By 1934 the company was known as Lego – from the Danish phrase leg godt, meaning “play well”.

While the introduction of plastic moulding mechanisms breathed new life into Lego, giving us the now infamous multi-coloured plastic bricks of our childhood, over time the company found it was spreading itself too thin. As the world around Lego moved into an increasingly more digital era, the Lego Group appeared to be on its way out.

But then, in 2004, new CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp arrived, and his radical rethinking of the Lego Group not only breathed new life into the company, but also saved it from near-destruction (PDF Annual Report 2004 LEGO Group  - interesting read). Make no bones about it: Jørgen Vig Knudstorp is the man who rescued Lego.

Amazing Lego Facts Infographic: (Click Image to View Full Size)

According to Knudstorp, his entire vision is based around the Lego brick, “that it is our heritage and it is our future”, but in this modern business world, how do you ensure a firm financial backing for a company whose main product is – essentially – falling behind the times?

“Sometimes when I speak about our vision, I talk about a 2.2 version of the Lego Group,” Knudstorp exclusively explains to MeetTheBoss.tv. “When we talk about the digital age, I talk about a 2.2 version of Lego to signify that we are not leaving the physical world, but we are taking the best learning from that and continuing with that as our actual mainstay and core business, and we are adding the digital revolution.”
Speaking exclusively to Adam Burns, Editor-in-Chief at MeetTheBoss.tv, Knudstorp explains some of his truly “out the box” ideas that helped make a critical difference at Lego. And, now that the brand is up and running again and is doing incredibly well once more, Lego is now facing a multitude of options for future opportunities.

“I think it is a golden rule in business that most companies don’t die of starvation, but die of indigestion,” jokes Knudstorp. “There is so much opportunity if you open your eyes to it. One of the rules I stick to is that you can really only build an adjacency to your core business every three to five years, because it’s such a major undertaking in terms of culture and in terms of capability.”

Watch the full interview with Jørgen Vig Knudstorp CEO, LEGO: The Man Who Rescued Lego
And Knudstorp knows what he is talking about. Not only is he responsible for the reimagining of culture at Lego, which has helped the construction toy maker to redefine its business model, but he also admits that “indigestion” is where Lego struggled before – and that the group won’t be making those mistakes again. “You run the risk that people will lose their focus on their core business as they pursue these new adjacencies that have become the ‘new and sexy thing’ to do.

“So for me, a major paradigm shift is that the core business is the most exciting and what we need to continue to do is reinvent every year and make sure we build our business on this in the future.”
Lego remains a staple of the childhood toy box. Currently approximately seven Lego sets are sold each second, and the world’s children reportedly spend 5 billion hours a year playing with Lego bricks. Children can buy Lego products in more than 130 countries, and the company has theme parks in four countries across the globe.

Since Knudstorp’s arrival in particular, Lego has made tremendous ground. “For the first two years of this new transformation of the company, we said we didn’t have a strategy – all we had was an action plan,”.
“It was kind of like having a heart attack. After maybe having tried for 30 years to change your lifestyle you suddenly realize that you either change your lifestyle or you are going to die. And then people get very motivated and they get on this action plan of healthy eating and nutrition – or in our case, back-to-basics, serving the retailers really well and making the products children really care about and getting back to the core of what Lego is really all about: A process of rediscovery.”

Image Copyright: The High Life PowerPig

The world's first WALKING house designed to beat the floods

By Daily Mail Reporter

Designers have unveiled the "ultimate property" that they say will provide a solution to beating the floods - a WALKING house.

The property has been built on six hydraulic legs and was designed by art collective N55 in Copenhagen, Denmark, who worked in conjunction with engineers in Massachusetts, U.S.

The 10ft high home is solar and wind powered and can stroll at walking pace across all terrains.

Designers say it provides a solution to the problem of rising water levels as the house can simply walk away from floods.

Enlarge

The first prototype of the walking house which offers a unique solution to future housing needs

Like normal homes, it comes equipped with a living room, kitchen, toilet, bed and wood stove.

However, the house can walk thanks to a mainframe computer which controls the legs.

Helen Robinson of the Wysing Arts Centre said; 'This is far more than a caravan. It's all about sustainable living - it can sustain a life for many years.

Enlarge

The computer controlled pod can move across all terrain at walking speed

'It may seem radical but it could be a solution to land use in the near future.'

The pod will take its maiden stroll around rural Cambridgeshire at the Wysing Arts Centre in Bourn later this week.

The prototype cost £30,000 to build, including materials and time, but the designers believe it could be constructed for a lot less.

Helen said: 'For this to be a plausible alternative it would have to come down in price.

'After all it is neither a mansion or a gimmick. It is a recognisable alternative for people on a low income.'