Between Preservation and Progress

In many ways, I find myself at an unusual intersection. As a student from an American university spending the summer in Copenhagen, I am so excited to see this city’s innovative approaches to sustainable urban planning. Copenhagen’s transportation system, its use of renewable energy, its green public spaces are all inspiring to me—hailing as I do from a place where these ideas have yet to be fully embraced. And yet I also love Copenhagen’s historical charm, its cobblestone streets, and its old buildings. I wonder if these elements of the city, both integral parts of my experience here, are necessarily at odds with each other.

I would argue that the city’s sustainable design and historic appeal can and should be reconciled. I believe that both constitute essential elements of this city’s heritage—indeed, of any city’s heritage. Sustainable design is, to be sure, the way of the future. But we cannot ignore the realities of the existing built environment as we work towards that goal. Nor should we forsake the record of Copenhagen’s thousand-year history that lines its streets and fills its buildings. We must find a balance between what should be celebrated in the old and what must be developed anew.

In terms of creating that balance, Copenhagen has moved far beyond anything that I have seen in the United States. In the US, the most progressive voices call historic preservation—that is, working with the existing built environment—inherently sustainable. According to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a not-for-profit, non-governmental organization leading the historic preservation movement in the United States:

"The conservation and improvement of our existing built resources, including the re-use of historic and older buildings, greening the existing building stock, and reinvestment in older and historic communities, is crucial to combating climate change."

In other words, the National Trust has identified the importance of adaptive reuse—a strategy long employed in Europe—in making our cities and towns less wasteful, more sustainable, and generally better places to live and work. Yet few state and municipal sustainability plans in the U.S. currently emphasize this approach. As a result, it is actually preservationists such as the National Trust who are helping to lead the movement in the U.S. to retrofit and reuse existing buildings as part of a sustainable development strategy. They stand at odds with developers urging the construction of new buildings, often ones that are only somewhat more efficient than the un-renovated existing stock and that will likely be replaced in the not too distant future.

From my early observations and explorations in Copenhagen, the conversation here has advanced much further. Like many European cities, Copenhagen has fully embraced the importance of adaptive reuse, using its old buildings and neighborhoods in new and imaginative ways. Nonetheless, adaptive reuse is not the end of sustainable development in Copenhagen. Here the preservation of existing buildings is not seen as inherently sustainable, given that their levels of efficiency cannot compete with that of the new building technologies. (In fact, many experts estimate that even the most advanced retrofits can only improve the energy efficiency of existing buildings by 40 percent.) Thus if Copenhagen is to achieve its ambitious goal of carbon neutrality, the city needs new, truly efficient buildings and neighborhoods to offset the inherent inefficiencies of its old ones. Here historic preservation comes at a cost, and must be integrated into larger discussions about sustainable development. Planners in Copenhagen now speak of using carbon negative districts such as Nordhavn to offset the unavoidable carbon emissions of “those grand, old buildings” elsewhere in the city, thereby helping to “solve the entire CO2 puzzle.” In this city, new construction makes it possible to preserve the old.

Copenhagen’s example also tells us that the cost of preserving the old is one worth paying, not only to safeguard its historic legacy, but also to meet the needs of its present inhabitants. Copenhagen teaches us that historic preservation should not be static. According to the mission of Realdania, a Danish organization similar in many ways to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the built environment, historic as well as modern, should be used “to improve the quality of life for the common good.” Consider, as an example, the F. L. Smidth site in Copenhagen, where “an open vision for a future city quarter based on preserving and reusing as many of the city’s industrial buildings as possible” inspired planners to transform an old district into a model urban community. As this case reveals, often the compactness and multifunctionality of the traditional “European city” are the very features needed to create the kind of community where a sustainable lifestyle is possible.

I will examine these issues in greater depth in this blog, considering how Copenhagen has managed to become a model of sustainable urban development while working within the constraints of its existing buildings and cultural heritage. Each week this summer, I will travel around Copenhagen and beyond, exploring how planners, architects, preservationists, and property owners have dealt with the need to promote sustainability in the midst of an existing built environment—one that often has tremendous character, charm, and value itself. Along the way, I will examine the balance—that which already exists and that which should be pursued—between old and new, between reuse and replacement, between preservation and progress.