A sustainable future on Amager?

For the last two weeks the students on Hum-Tek – a basic study on Roskilde University focusing on people, technology and design – have been working in eight different workshops with very different subjects. As an external lecturer on the master education Plan, City and Process I hosted one of the workshops titled Architecture and Sustainable Urban Design. Starting from scratch last Monday the students were to organise themselves into groups and develop five different scenarios for future sustainable development in the neighbourhood of Amagerbro and present them this Friday afternoon at a bazaar-like event called Showtime.

The five individual scenarios were each attached to a part of a route through the Eastern part of the neighbourhood, connecting five vital spots:

1. Amager Center – the local mall
2. Musiktorvet – a future cultural hub on Øresundsvej
3. Lergravsparken – an urban park with a metro station
4. Siljangade – a phased-out industrial site being turned into a ‘creative zone’
5. Christmas Møllers Plads – the entrance to the neighbourhood from the city centre of Copenhagen

With this as a starting point the groups were to describe their part of the route connecting two of these spots and describe the urban fabric, characteristics from an urban geography point of view and focus on things taken for granted that constitutes the sustainable city on the route (or does not). Moreover they were to identify an opportunity for creating an urban intervention that would support sustainable development in the area, support the idea with theory and international inspiration and convey the idea to an audience at the Showtime-event.

The idea behind the workshop is to give the students – who are on their first year at the university – a basic idea of the city fabric, its functions and history and how basic field studies can reveal the underlying structures of the city: What does it say about a neighbourhood that there are only old-fashioned pubs and no trendy cafés? What can you tell about the inhabitants of the street by looking at the curtains and décor in the windows? Why does the people not collect their dog’s excrements here when they do in other parts of the city? The site of the existing city is to bring focus to the fact that conversion and retrofitting is one of the most important issues in Europe and the US when it comes to sustainable urban development, as by 2050 80 % of our cities will consist of what is already here.

To kick-start the whole thing I did a two-hours-straight lecture on architecture, urbanism and sustainability and dragged the students through a three and a half hours walk through the area visiting all the five spots and discussing the city as we moved on. From there on they divided into five groups and worked on their projects that were presented today – interrupted by ad hoc lectures on request from the students and group reviews of the progress supplemented by individual guidance.

From Amager Center to Musiktorvet the students identified a leftover building that used to be a bank’s archive and now is named ‘the ghost house’ by the locals. Inspired by City of Copenhagen’s plans for pocket parks, they created a vision for a park on the site, a green façade on the house and a simple and poetic collage envisioning how the house could be transformed into a cultural hub encompassing functions identified by interviewing people on the street: A café on the ground floor, a cinema spanning several floors above, rehearsal rooms for local musicians and a roof-top garden providing the locals with a new perspective of their neighbourhood.

Moving on towards Lergravsparken, another group created a movie suggesting how a Cradle to Cradle system living off biological resources from the future Musiktorvet could bring more life and green qualities into the local parks and gardens and simultaneously function as a vehicle for social development in the area as there needed to be created a community behind the system to keep it running. The movie featured a wheelbarrow in a hectic race down the street moving composted waste from place to place and stop-motion visualisations illustrating all the new green qualities emerging in the neighbourhood. Supported with the basic Cradle to Cradle theory and a critical discussion about the project’s pros and cons for the stakeholders it gave a serious and entertaining vision of a small scale Cradle to Cradle project in the city.

En route to Siljangade the third group attacked a vast and unstructured lawn serving a newly built apartment block on the site of a former painting factory. Using observations of the locals usage of the area they suggested to lay out a series of walking paths where people were already walking and use the spaces in-between these paths to create functions for the locals. This resulted in a strategy for how the users of the area could be ‘alone together’ in public space doing what they were already doing on the lawn but now in separate but interconnected areas for parkour, dog-walking, dirt-biking, barbequing and the like. Thus they would not interfere with each other’s activities but still enjoy the qualities of one large public space: a simple yet effective strategy for enhancing the value of the neighbourhood’s existing qualities.

From Siljangade to Christmas Møllers Plads most of the area is an old industrial area now being phased out. The group working in this area suggested that a part of the area was laid out as a ruin park – among other cases inspired by Emscher Park in the Ruhr District and RAW in Berlin. Instead of tearing down the buildings and rebuild they suggested to keep buildings of high quality and potential, tear down some to create a route through the area, create acupunctural interventions on the site and leave the rest to nature. Visualized with images of the reference cases and a model showing self grown planting taking over the buildings over time, the group showed an invigorating approach to the development of parks in the city and reuse of obsolete parts of the urban fabric for recreational purposes.

Closing the loop the last group illustrated the route from Christmas Møllers Plads to Amager Center in a video portraying distinctive parts of the area like the large cemetery, Øresundskollegiet – the largest dormitory in Scandinavia built as a concrete high-rise completely disconnected from the surrounding city – and the block of flats in red brick that make up the majority of the housing areas around the city centre of Copenhagen. On a large green strip left over from a former railway on Amager they created an urban park with functions to support local institutions like a kindergarten, a sports club etc. with new facilities, providing the foundation for a healthier city.

Given the short period of time and that the students had never before worked in an urban realm they really achieved a lot during the workshop. From the basic concept of the city to visionary proposals for its further development and a whole new vocabulary to articulate the possibilities and challenges, they are now ready to move on and develop their knowledge and skills on both the theoretical and practical aspects of urban sustainable development.