Towards a new urban identity

I recently learned about an interesting technique for urban revitalization: mental byomdannelse, or mental urban regeneration. This technique is comes from the recognition that a successful city district needs more than well-designed buildings and well-planned spaces. In order to be a place with life and identity, an urban environment needs stories, events, and people.

Mental byomdannelse seeks to inject often elusive, intangible elements into an urban environment—qualities such as spiritedness, liveliness, and playfulness. That might mean holding civic events to enliven a public square. Or encouraging specialty shops or outdoor cafes, private enterprises that help to make a place special, to move to otherwise bleak areas. Perhaps that would mean establishing community organizations that help adults or children to meet their neighbors. Or creating temporary public spaces to transform vacant lots into vibrant spaces. And true to the theme of this blog, mental byomdannelse manages to bring history and sustainability under one umbrella. After all, a historic urban environment is full of stories, and a sustainable urban environment takes into account issues that affect residents’ quality of life, issues such as air quality, road congestion, and availability of green spaces. Planners might use an area’s history to convince residents of the richness of their city district, or use considerations of environmental sustainability to address public health or urban liveability issues. Considering history and sustainability can help to create a sense of place and to build a community.

While I find mental byomdannelse to be an attractive idea and wonder whether this approach to planning might prove useful in depressed urban environments around the world, I offer this praise with a caveat. I recognize that this sort of social and cultural revitalization is somewhat nebulous at best and totally unproductive at worst. Mental regeneration is rarely enough for a depressed urban environment. A “mental uplift” seems ridiculous when the basic needs of city residents continue to be unmet. Without sufficient food, a sanitary water supply, working infrastructure, safe housing, and countless other baseline requirements for a functional urban environment, public squares and preserved historic buildings become useless, even seem silly. But take care of the baseline—a task which requires quantitative benchmarks for economic development and investments in physical infrastructure—and you are free to play with mental urban regeneration.

In this way, mental byomdannelse will prove essential to the regeneration of Valby, an area in the southwest of Copenhagen that is currently the subject of one of the Municipality of Copenhagen’s “quarter lifts.” Together with a 50 million DKK (approximately $10 million) investment in improving the area’s housing stock, improving road conditions, and addressing other infrastructural issues, government officials hope that mental byomdannelse will help to promote social integration, make Valby residents proud of their city district, and generally improve citizens’ quality of life. City planners will use Valby’s history to cultivate a sense of place, teaching residents and visitors about the richness of the district by posting placards with information about the history of particular streets or buildings. So too will city planners encourage the integration of Valby’s diverse residents by promoting recreation in public spaces, parks or the green cycle lane. With each of these initiatives, planners hope to move beyond economic and technical considerations, addressing social and cultural issues as well.

In a sense, the philosophical underpinnings of mental byomdannelse are also present in the master plan for the development of the Carlsberg site. Branding the area as “the Carlsberg site” injects 160 years of Copenhagen’s history into a district that will consist largely of new construction. And planning for public spaces is ultimately about facilitating relationships between residents who might not otherwise interact with each other, about creating a neighborhood rather than merely a collection of well-constructed apartments. In their emphasis on maintaining some of the region’s “roughness,” Carlsberg’s planners have essentially realized that sterile environments tend to be alienating. But make an area feel lived-in and live-able, and you will have created an area to which inhabitants can become attached.

Thus the basic premise of mental byomdannelse can play a role in the regeneration of existing areas as well as the development of an essentially new city district, in a public project with tight budget constraints as well as a project funded by private developers with more money to spend. In the universe of urban planning initiatives, mental byomdannelse is a useful tool because it is relatively inexpensive and is able to work within the constraints of the existing built environment. As I see it, a “mental regeneration” means devising creative solutions and considering city districts in all their idiosyncratic complexities rather than only applying solutions that have been engineered offsite.

Certainly I am aware that to many observers, particularly to many American observers used to relying largely on quantitative benchmarks and “techno-fixes,” mental byomdannelse seems soft and useless. And I do agree that physical infrastructure, economic development, and other “hard” indicators of progress must be an essential part of any urban regeneration project. But living in Copenhagen is teaching me that addressing social and cultural issues in a depressed urban environment does matter. I am excited to follow the regeneration of Valby as the project unfolds, and I would love to see more cities in the United States and elsewhere in the world adopt this more holistic approach to city planning. Otherwise, I have come to believe, our communities will be much worse for the wear.