A Green City Is a Happy City
By Justin Davidson
On the summer’s longest
Saturday, late in the day but
hours before dark, I joined
the currents of humanity
converging on the former
shipyards at Refshaleøen. Some
headed for Copenhell, the
heavy-metal festival that howls
across the disused docklands.
Others followed signs scrawled
on blackboards (this way!
almost thee!) that blazed
the path to Reffen, an open-air
encampment of food vendors
operating out of repurposed
shipping containers, where
all the cutlery is biodegradable.
I headed for the restaurant
Amass, where little is wasted:
today’s leftover fermented-
potato bread will be shaved
into chips and packaged in a
compostable cornstarch bag.
The activity at Refshaleøen
jangles together in a district
that hardly existed a decade ago.
Recycling open space and filling
it with people, food, and music
(rather than vehicles or towers)
helps fulfil the dominant
aspirations of Danish-style
urbanism: live well and do no
harm to the Earth. More than
almost any other major
metropolis, Copenhagen has
committed itself to minimising
waste, emissions, and energy
consumption, all while
maximising life’s pleasantness.
The city has vowed to be carbon-
neutral by 2025 and to wean
itself off fossil fuels by 2050. It’s
closing in on those goals after
decades of investment, which
saw the installation of coastal
wind turbines and eicient, but
costly, power plants that burn
waste. The most hulking new
monument on this once-
desolate peninsula is Amager
Bakke (CopenHill), a garbage-
vaporising power plant.
Scheduled to open this fall, it’s
expected to be so non-polluting that its pitched
roof, planted with trees and criss-crossed by
hiking trails, will double as an artificial ski
slope, a major draw in hill-deprived Denmark.
The task of turning a usually unpleasant piece
of infrastructure into a tourist attraction went
to Bjarke Ingels, the charismatic local architect
who has become a global star, partly on the
strength of such swashbuckling symbolism.
At Amager Bakke, the whiteness of the snow
will be an unmistakable marker of pristine air.
But the most visible manifestations of
Copenhagen’s environmental ambitions are
the cyclists who fill the streets in peaceable,
orderly swarms. Perhaps because biking is so
deeply ingrained in the culture here, it doesn’t
have the testosterone-stoked speed-demon
attitude that infuriates pedestrians in other
cities. Many residents ride without helmets,
some push cartloads of children or groceries,
and almost none are outfitted in fluorescent
Lycra. About 40 per cent of all trips to work and
school take place by bike; oicials are hoping to
nudge that number closer to 50 per cent. Even
visitors who rent their wheels by the hour can
feel the effects of the city’s investment in its
cycling infrastructure. A new, futuristic foot-
and-bike bridge crosses the Inner Harbour.
Another, the Circle Bridge, designed by the
artist Olafur Eliasson, consists of a chain of
round platforms that privilege ambling and
loitering over whizzing by. A new elevated
bike-and-pedestrian-only highway swoops
around the Fisketorvet shopping centre,
part of a network that reaches far outside
the city: you can, for instance, bike safely
and pleasantly on lanes all 47 kilometres to
Kronborg Castle in Helsingør.
The synthesis of experience, environmental
urgency, political will, and major investment
expresses itself in daily routines. Winters are
tough, but bikers are tougher. When it snows,
municipal workers clear bike lanes before
ploughing the roads. I once asked a Danish
architect who had just biked to work through
a storm whether she wore special all-weather
gear. She laughed. Her jeans were damp but
they’d dry, she said. Oice decorum allows for
windblown hair and slightly rumpled outfits.
As an outsider, you notice the touch of
smugness that colours the way Copenhageners
broadcast their environmental virtue. Urbanist
Jan Gehl has spent decades cheering the
conversion of a noisy traic artery, Strøget,
into a popular pedestrian drag—work he has
parlayed into a reputation as an urban guru.Cities, he insists, should focus
less on buildings than on the
spaces between them.
Commandeering a derelict
wharf for concerts or foodie
havens can improve their
citizens’ collective psychology.
After dinner at Amass,
I boarded a harbour boat bus to
another recently repurposed
pier, Ofelia Plads, which acts as
the national theatre’s front yard.
Thousands of people dangled
their feet over the water and
listened to a live balladeer.
A fake bonfire made of LEDs
flickered on a floating platform,
and no motorised sound
disturbed the beery serenity
that hung over the scene.Dining’s New
International Groove
By Kat OdellFifteen years ago, the chef and
wild-ingredients champion
René Redzepi introduced the
world to the hyper-seasonal,
vegetable-forward style of
cookery dubbed New Nordic
when he opened the first
iteration of his restaurant,
Noma. Now, a fresh wave of
talented chefs who worked
under Redzepi are nudging
the city’s palate further afield.
Though ex-Noma sous-chef
Christian Puglisi might be best
known for the Michelin-starred
tasting-menu boîte Relæ, his
four-year-old Bæst blazes a
noteworthy trail of its own with
a Scandinavian spin on wood-
fired pizza. Sicilian-born Puglisi
reworks the Italian classic with
local grains and house-made
mozzarella; the terroir of both
lends a distinctly Nordic flair.
Meanwhile, Matt Orlando, also
a Noma alum, embraces the
Danish capital’s eco-friendly
nature—with some twists.
At Amass, the California native
sources everything excepttravelandleisureindia.in