Copenhagen's climate-change adapted neighborhood

[darnkatz]

Why does Copenhagen get to be so forward-thinking and we just suck? I want to be protected from rising sea levels and to have amazing bicycling infrastructure, dammit. /kicks rocks

Copenhagen unveils first climate-change adapted neighborhood

Cloudburst boulevards and innovative bowl-shaped parks are designed to protect the city from rising sea levels

January 26, 2015
5:00AM ET


A visualization of the center square of St. Kjeld. The section of
Copenhagen is the first neighborhood in the world to use vegetation and
water to prepare for rising sea levels and other consequences of climate
change. Tredje Natur

Come hell or high water, the residents of St. Kjeld, a Copenhagen
neighborhood, will be ready. Actually, skip the hell part. But when the
next megastorm hits the Danish capital, St. Kjeld’s residents should be
safe and dry. That’s because as of December, they live in the world’s
first climate-change-adapted neighborhood.

“St. Kjeld’s transformation shows what can be done if you take climate
change seriously,” says Morten Kabell, Copenhagen’s deputy mayor in
charge of environment and technology. In truth, after a catastrophic
cloudburst in 2011 that resulted in damage of about $1 billion, this
windy port city had little choice but to find ways of protecting itself.


“Climate change is a reality and we have to be prepared for floods,
storms and rising sea levels,” says René Sommer Lindsay, the city
official in charge of St. Kjeld’s transformation. “The cloudburst was
really a wake-up call. We said, ‘Instead of doing pinpoint projects,
let’s develop a rainwater master plan.’ Rainwater is only a problem if
it goes where you don’t want it to go.” That gave city planners the
option of adding “gray infrastructure” — technologies that, in this
case, would have included essentially more and bigger sewers — or
designing “green,” nature-based structures that collect the water and
lead it away.


They went for the green option. “Adding sewers is insanely costly, so
a green-and-blue [vegetation and water] approach is more economical,”
notes Esben Alslund-Lanthén, an analyst at the Copenhagen-based
sustainability think tank Sustainia. There was just one challenge: No
city has ever tried climate-change-adapting a whole neighborhood using
just plants and water. “It’s a huge amount of water that we’ll have to
redirect when the next cloudburst hits,” says Flemming Rafn Thomsen of
Tredje Natur, the Danish architecture firm chosen for the project. “We
looked at St. Kjeld and thought, ‘That’s a lot of asphalt with no
function. We can use some of that space for water.’” On top of having
little function, the asphalt gave St. Kjeld, a somewhat rundown
working-class neighborhood, an even more depressing feel.

The answer, Rafn Thomsen and the city decided, was to tear up the
neighborhood’s squares and replace their asphalt covering with what’s
essentially a hilly, grassy carpet interspersed with walking paths.
Should a storm, flood or rising sea levels hit the Danish capital again,
the bucolic mini-parks will turn into water basins, the hills
essentially functioning as the sides of a bowl. Thanks to a new pipe
system, the squares will even be able to collect water from surrounding
buildings’ roofs. Surrounding streets will, for their part, be turned
into “cloudburst boulevards.” Under ordinary circumstances, they’ll just
be ordinary streets with raised sidewalks, but during floods and
megastorms, they’ll become canals, channeling rainwater away from the
squares to the harbor. Millions of gallons of water will be dispatched
back to the harbor on such aboveground waterways, St. Kjeld becoming a
temporary Venice.


Tåsinge Square, in St. Kjeld.Tredje Natur (2)


The team got to work, and on Dec. 6, the world’s first
climate-change-adapted neighborhood was inaugurated. Children grilled
hot dogs over fires in the newly green Tåsinge Square, while older
residents sat down for a rest on recently installed park benches. St.
Kjeld is now officially known as Klimakvarteret, the Climate Quarter. By
this summer, the transformation of the neighborhood’s courtyard will be
complete, followed next year by another square and St. Kjeld’s
streets-turned-cloudburst boulevards. A group of residents have also
launched a 718-square-yard rooftop garden that will supply produce for the neighborhood.


The inauguration of climate-resilient St. Kjeld in December 2014.Ursula Bach

To most people, though, reinvented plazas with hills and lush vegetation
suggest city beautification, not hard-core climate-disaster
preparedness. That’s exactly what the architects and city planners had
in mind. “If the rain comes, it will be a spectacle rather than a
problem,” says Sommer Lindsay. “And if we never have a flood or
cloudburst again, it’s still value for money because we got a more
beautiful neighborhood.” And as far as Rafn Thomsen is concerned, far
from frightening residents, purposely flooded plazas and streets will
bring them closer to nature. “Climate change is a huge opportunity to
build greener cities,” he explains. “We should stop pushing nature away
and stop pretending that we can push the weather away. It’s a whole new
paradigm.” Should a cloudburst of the same size as the one from four
years ago hit Copenhagen again, it will only fill Tåsinge Square to 40
percent capacity. During Copenhagen’s expected heat spells, the new
vegetation will cool the air, and in order to collect water even faster
during storms, Rafn Thomsen’s team is developing mini-water towers for
use across the city.


Still, city officials may need to do more to inform residents about
the Climate Quarter. One Copenhagener contacted by Al Jazeera America
confessed to not knowing anything about it, adding that she is, at any
rate, happy in her flat in the city’s old town. Another resident wasn’t
familiar with St. Kjeld’s reinvention either, but suggested that it may
be a good way of attracting new residents to Copenhagen.

They may not have to move to St. Kjeld: Copenhagen City Hall is about
to embark on an ambitious plan to make the whole city climate change
resilient. Though there will be individual variations, each neighborhood
will feature cloudburst boulevards and beautified squares ready for
water-basin duty. One Copenhagen suburb
is already building its own climate quarter, and Kabell reports
receiving climate-quarter inquiries from mayors around the world.



While a city like Mumbai, which the World Bank ranks
as the world’s fifth most exposed to floods, may not be able to afford
Copenhagen’s climate-change innovation, many others can: Seven of the 10
most exposed cities, including New York and Tampa, Florida, are located
in developed countries. New York, which has committed $20 billion to
climate-change adaptation, is opting for floodwalls, while the Dutch delta city of Rotterdam has gone even further, designing a plan for floating neighborhoods.
Several others, in turn, are experimenting with Copenhagen-style
mini-parks, which Kabell accredits to the fact that “people like blue
and green, not gray.” “Countries talk,” he adds, “but cities know they
have to act.”

[aurora]

Feb 4, 2015 0:21:14 GMT -5 darnkatz said:

Why does Copenhagen get to be so forward-thinking and we just suck? I want to be protected from rising sea levels and to have amazing bicycling infrastructure, dammit. /kicks rocks
...

Probably partly because they stand to lose a much higher percentage of their country than we do in response to rising sea levels (since more of their total land area is coastal by percent, and the highest point in the country is 500ish ft.).

Also because they don't have a ridiculously polarized 2-party political system whose only goal is to make the other side look bad and nobody cares about actual governing anymore.

(Don't get me wrong; Denmark does have its share of issues.  But climate change denial is not one of them.)