Nordhavnen, the sustainable city of the future
What is a city but the people?
Brief
CPH City and Port Development has launched an open international ideas competition for the Northern Harbour in Copenhagen, a new urban development area with room for 40,000 residents and 40,000 staff in buildings with a total floor area of three to four million square metres: Scandinavia’s largest metropolitan development project.
The winning entry will be one of the City of Copenhagen’s lighthouse projects at COP 15, the UN climate change summit to be held in Copenhagen in December 2009. The intention is to give the entries that have been awarded prizes a prominent position in connection with the summit and actively promote them as the most visionary and innovative efforts to create future urban development based on environmental, social and economic sustainability.
City Living / Environment
The Nordhavnen Project area, situated to the north of Copenhagen’s centre at a short cycling distance from the downtown, offers an extraordinary opportunity to design a new urban coastline overlooking the sea. Two elements, the quality of city living and the relationship with nature, become central themes of the project at various scales. The project focuses on balancing environmental issues with the intensity and variety of urban life in order to create a new model of city living, combining the best of both worlds: a more mixed urban model and a diffused awareness for the ecological issues of our society. The new city will integrate into the larger Copenhagen area contributing to it’s virtuous present development, setting new standards in sustainable planning and lifestyle, without renouncing the expression of its own singularity.
Strategic Guidelines / Mixed-use
The analysis of the existing morphology and environmental parameters of the site (wind, water, noise, sun exposure) together with construction data, establish strategic guidelines for massing, the localization of inner and outer spaces, views toward the sea, soil occupation and the design of green spaces. The project, although suggesting precise activities for its various districts, focuses on the development of hybrid spaces of mixed-use that interconnect the diverse neighbourhoods. The entire project area, with it’s narrow connection to the “mainland”, is perceived somehow as a “magical interior space” projected into the sea. The project aims to preserve this peculiar environmental quality while structuring an effi cient and ecological transport connection to the city.
Green Frame / Mobility
A green frame tightly connected to the urban surroundings, structures the entire master plan. The main vehicular road connecting the new cruise terminal and the northern area to the inner city, flows under an elevated park, screening inhabitants from air and noise pollution while offering the new city a unique and spectacular urban park. It carries a new light rail system, several cycling greenways and pedestrian paths that create a circulation network linking all sites of special activity to the surrounding city, thus refl ecting the contemporary variety of choice and needs.
Energy / Landscape
A sophisticated and evolved energy strategy for this new city is outlined: an advanced multi-fuel-zero-emission power station; distributed electrical generation; an automated waste disposal system; the use of all renewable energy sources; algae and biomass farms; hydrogen cars and fi lling stations providing enough range for travel in the Copenhagen area; experimental hydrogen heated buildings; an Hydrogen Research Centre. This strategy will permit the entire new area to operate like an oxigenator. Green areas are conceived as a living entity with all the indeterminacy of that condition, and are connected to sea views and water activities. Moving towards the north area, the landscape tends to reach an increasingly natural condition culminating in a sequence of wild islands.
