On leaving Copenhagen

This summer, I have increasingly realized that the relationship between historic preservation and sustainable development is not a niche issue but touches upon many of the most central concerns in contemporary urban planning. Reconciling preservation and progress is ultimately a matter of modernizing the existing built environment, of creating a city that is full of the best of the old and the best of the new.

Yet another case in point: I recently traveled to the planning offices of Frederiksberg Municipality, an independent city district surrounded on all sides by Copenhagen proper, to speak with officials about historic buildings and sustainable renovations. Once again, the scope of the conversation expanded, and I found myself learning fundamental lessons about cities, planning, and the political process.

In Frederiksberg, "core principles for neighborhood development” include requirements to respect the original design of a street, to pay attention to sunlight effects when constructing an addition, and to refrain from altering buildings in ways that would change the character of an area. For a significant portion of Frederiksberg's buildings--3,000 structures in a 8.7-square kilometer (3-square mile) area--owners are not permitted to make any changes without prior approval from planning officials.  All of these regulations fit into the larger framework of the municipal strategic plan, a document that sets long-term planning priorities.  In Denmark, this sort of strategic, comprehensive, spatial planning has long been the norm. Government officials plan just as much for today’s built environment as for the built environment of the future.

Compare that to town and city planning in the United States. There planning has traditionally been minimal, for reasons ranging from a history of anti-government ideology to the greater availability of land and other natural resources. American planning efforts have largely concentrated on land use regulation in the form of local zoning codes, telling individuals how they can build but not whether they can build. Thus planning has generally been confined to the private initiatives of developers or non-governmental organizations, with some input from local governments. Federal and state governments have played only an indirect role, if any role at all. Strategic, comprehensive, or spatial planning simply has not existed in the United States.

Certainly the Danish model possesses a number of advantages lacking in the American one. The emphasis on issues bigger than land use—on considerations of an area’s physical form and urban design—have permitted Danish communities to be built as holistic systems. The result has been less urban sprawl, farther reaching public transportation systems, and better preserved town and city centers. I do think that metropolitan areas in the United States would be better with the Finger Plan, or with better public transportation, or with more compact town and city centers. We have many lessons to learn from Denmark.

But as much as I have come to admire the Danish approach, it feels far too easy to travel abroad for a summer, reject my own civil society as a total failure, and return home touting the virtues of a system whose range of advantages and disadvantages I can hardly have experienced in full. Indeed, one of the great themes in planning literature over the past decade has been the gradual convergence of different planning systems, European and American. It seems clear that planners in Denmark and the United States—or in Britain, Germany, Holland, wherever—will need to learn from each other’s successes and failures as we operate in an increasingly complex, increasingly globalized world.

Consider recent reforms in Danish planning. The Danish Planning Act of 2007 decentralizes the planning process to a certain extent, giving far more weight to regional and municipal planning efforts rather than strategic national directives. I think that we can connect this change with the renewed emphasis on regional planning in the European Union's planning directives, which are responding to the realities of the globalized, market-driven, 21st-century world.

For its part, the United States has begun to realize that strategic spatial planning, long the norm in Denmark, matters. Once a virtually unused power, spatial planning has been introduced in several American states over the past 10 or 20 years. The focus has increasingly shifted from land use regulation to comprehensive planning. Essentially for the first time, economic development has become a goal of a number of these regulatory efforts. Discussions about transportation networks in metropolitan areas have tended to be more strategy-oriented and have often involved multiple sectors. Of course, these reforms have all been fragmented and incomplete at best, but the first step has been taken.

In other words, the Danish and American approaches to planning are gradually converging.  For obvious reasons, the two nations' approaches will never cease to be distinct systems, for town and city planning inherently deals with particulars rather than universals.  And since I recognize that this discussion can become very politicized very quickly, I will refrain from trying to defend one spot along the spectrum between two different systems. But I will conclude by saying that I think both Danish and American planners can benefit from learning from each other’s approaches in order to discover exactly what works and what doesn’t. These discussions might be the most valuable resource we have in solving the urban problems of the 21st century.