Bo Gronlund:

Abstract:

The project 'The informational city and the street as urban form' pose the question whether newer urban districts built with goals of urbanity since the early 1980s really became vibrant urban places. A quest for more urbanity - also in new urban districts - broke though in Scandinavia together with postmodernism 25 years ago and several areas with this goal have been built. The planners have typically been concerned with a more traditional urban pattern of blocks, streets and squares, a mix of functions and visible people in public space.

Most of the new districts have been a success concerning housing quality, public services, green spaces and car traffic calming. Some also have considerably lower crime rates but there are also examples of the opposite. Mixed functions including shops and private offices have proved difficult to in at the intended amount. Traffic calming is here part of the problem, as none or too little through traffic makes the customer base smaller than necessary.

The projects empirical studies follows the development of the public street life, private enterprises and the spatial structure of the movement network over a period of 10 years.

The empirical studies shows spatial configurations where the grids of movement lines are too fractal in their character and also have a quite uneven distribution of lines, too many lines and too many short lines. Pedestrians in public space are few, often close to zero, not only because of the spatial design, but also because wealth means few residents/km², unless extreme floor area ratios are used. The most central parts of the movement systems in the new districts have some pedestrian life, but it is difficult to get the vibrant urban quality outside of the traditional old urban cores. Shops and private firms often don't find the new districts attractive enough. Architecture also often is too monotonous overall, with large units and a too limited number of developers and architects.

The conclusion of the project is that the promotion of urbanity outside of the old urban cores demands a careful selection of qualified places and a programming that goes further than formalism combined with optimistic hopes for a functional mix, happening by itself if only permitted to do so.

At the same time we need a better understanding of thresholds of urbanity, where quantitative changes of 'intensity' of people and 'works' of culture and creation might mean a qualitative change of situations from no urbanity, to low level urbanity, to central place urbanity, to actual crowding and maybe information overload.

If goals for urbanity shall be meaningful and possible to evaluate and used in practice, a greater agreement on the concept and its complexity is needed, although it should not be too rigorous and probably never can be complete.

In affluent cities with advanced planning policies and cultural events, walking and bicycling is increasing in central city areas - or have been increasing in the last decades. In some cities the renewed urban life in public spaces is spilling over into neighbouring districts as well, as in Nørrebro and Vesterbro in Copenhagen. This has been noted not only by Jan Gehl and other urban researchers here, but also e.g. by the international magazine 'Wallpaper', that ranks Vesterbro among the most interesting creative areas in the world today.

In most of theses places the increased number of pedestrians, the increased number of cafés etc. is not primarily related to an increasing number of people living and working there. City life is going up while residents and employed are fairly constant or may be even decreasing. Some of the change might be explained by new kinds of people gradually taking over floor space and real estate in these areas, but most of the people you find in the public spaces in the inner city districts come from somewhere else - tourists from far away, people from the suburbs, etc.

In most of the rest of what is normally called 'urban areas', that is in more than 90% of the built up areas, there is only little urban life to be seen in most places most of the time. On many streets, roads, and footpaths the pedestrians and bicyclists are very far between.

A zero sum game?

On first thought therefore, urban life might be a zero sum game. The day has only 24 hours and most of them don't not take place in public. Further, the total population in the city-regions of north western Europe is fairly constant these days. The big reduction in the number of working hours per person are also possibly over. And in Scandinavia, female employment outside the home is now almost as high as is ever possible. Etc.

Then, if it is a zero sum game, for every pedestrian in the urban core there will be a pedestrian less in the suburbs? Is this the 'price' we are paying for inner city success?

This is probably partly true, but there are also other factors involved that tends to increase public life in the city for the average citizen, like a new interest for everyday exercise, the growing of special interests in the city, higher affluence that leads to more use of a variety of city functions, a growing number of 'events', a growing share of people who live as singles and need to see other people, a larger proportion of the population that are students, more people on early retirement, more pets to be walked, longer walking distances to parking lots, etc. - just to mention some of the possible explanations for a growth of the total level of activity in public space.

On the other hand, there are also factors at play tending to reduce public life in the city and even more so in the suburbs, factors that e.g. reduce walking and bicycling: a thinning out of the city through affluence, inward oriented lifestyles, and an 'urban' planning that in practice contributes to low average built densities and traffic systems that contradicts urban public life. In north western Europe we don't have unplanned sprawl - but dispersion we have anyhow, even if not as bad as it could have been.

Maybe this is also how a majority wants to live - to dwell in peace with a lot of empty space in the suburbs and outlaying areas, but to have the possibility to enjoy themselves in the city centres, when they feel like it. The best of both worlds? In spite of a too wasteful behaviour.......

At the end of this paper, I will come back in more detail to some of the general aspects undermining public life outside of the inner city areas. For now it is just necessary to sum up the introductory remarks about urban public life in north western Europe:

a) Urban life is to some extent a geographical zero sum game

b) There are factors that tends to increase the overall level of urban public life activities

c) There are other factors that tends to decrease the overall level of urban public life activities

What the concrete results will be and where is a dynamic issue, that we need to understand better, even knowing that urban processes will never stop changing.

For now, outside of the inner city areas - as a net effect - walking, bicycling and urban public life is mostly part of a daily life routine and often rather trivial, unless it happens in interesting natural surroundings. There might be exceptions from the routine though, like beaches in good weather, a local harbour, a sports event, an occasional festivity......

The only places outside of the inner city areas, where you normally see a lot of pedestrians, besides at some transportation nodes like airports and other traffic terminals, are the large suburban shopping malls. Here there might come 20.000 visitors a day, but in a very controlled, often rather monofunctional retail environment and with little 'ring' effects on the public life in the surrounding areas, the McDonalds in the mall working as the local meeting place. Even suburban campus universities contribute rather little to public life in their surroundings in this part of the world.

Attempts to make a difference: newly planned urban districts with goals of urban life

Beginning in the late 1970's - after a heavy but in most cases not very precise critique of post World War II modernist urban planning - a 'post-modern' urban design was introduced in north western Europe. It built theoretically, if you can call it that, on architects like Aldo Rossi, the Krier brothers, and a renewed interest for the European built urban heritage from before Le Corbusier, Bauhaus, CIAM, and the modernist state-approved planning guidelines. Jan Gehl also created a growing interest for 'life between buildings' from the 1960's onwards - but 'life between buildings' is not necessarily the same as urbanity.

In Sweden the major new show cases were in Stockholm: the Skarpnäck district, mostly finished in the mid 1980's and the Södra Station inner city district, mostly finished in the 1990s.

In Denmark the major show cases were in the Copenhagen metropolitan area: the Høje Tåstrup station district, of which important parts are still unbuilt, and Egebjerggård in the commune of Ballerup, built gradually over a decade until it became a major Danish housing exhibition event in 1996. These four 'project's all cover about the same area in size, roughly a half square kilometre each. They have streets, squares and urban blocks that seemingly break away from modernist physical planning principles as well as intensions of a functional mix with different kinds of housing, shops, offices and public services - and supposedly good conditions for pedestrians and bicyclists too.

These new urban districts have had the very best planning conditions: local politicians with the best intensions of making something extraordinary, mostly publicly owned land, architectural competitions, planning consultants and contributing architects with a high reputation for quality solutions, a lot of welfare tax money to spend, etc.

The built density of the areas varies rather much though, from a floor area ratio of 2.0 in Södra Station, to 1,0 in Skarpnäck, to 0,8 in the built up part Høje Tåstrup, to only about 0,25 in Egebjerggård. The number of residents varies from about 9000 in Skarpnäck to on less than 1000 in Høje Tåstrup, the latter having a number of employed that have to be counted in thousands instead. Another important difference is the degree of 'isolation' from the surrounding urban fabric, with three of them built mostly as islands in the landscape at 10-20 away from the city centre, while Södra Station is a new part of the inner city of Stockholm.[1]

The quality of life in these districts related to dwelling standards, amount of public services, greenery, ecological concerns, and accessibility for the disabled is quite high and shall not be debated here. The question is what happened to life outdoors and in public spaces there.

Several reviewers have expressed disappointment with the urban quality of these projects and interviews with the residents show a preference for a green environment in relation to the dwelling, much more than preferences for urbanity.

Walking and bicycling there - most of the spaces empty most of the time

In each of the 4 areas a mixed loop of possible movement was selected that had an overall length of 6-7 kilometres, taking about 1 1/2 hour to walk, each containing about 100 different movement line segments. These loops have been walked an average of more than 20 times in the mid 1990's and again, although not as many times, in 2002-2003. The loops were selected in such a way, that they comprises major pedestrian and bicycle routes as well as minor ones, and the most public streets and lanes as well as more 'private' ones through courtyards and back areas. In a space syntax context, you can say that the loops try to cover a selection of the whole spectre of lines of different integration values from the highest to the lowest and a lot of lines in between the extremes. All together, these routes have been walked for a total of more than 600 kilometres, at different times of the day, at different days in the week, mainly in rather good weather in the warmer half of the year.

On these routes all people on the same lines moving against the observer have been counted as men, women or children respectively. Visible static people, standing, sitting, or playing along the movement lines and in a distance of up to 15 meters from it, have been counted as well (in the courtyards all the outdoor people being there has been counted).

Below the 3 suburban cases are covered in relation to pedestrian and bicycle activity.

In Egebjerggård...... (to be continued)

In Høje Tåstrup, that has the least number of residents, the average number of people coming against you is 2,8 in 100 meters and the static people are 1,6 in 100 meters, that is an average of 4,4 people. In these numbers a walk inside the large regional shopping mall City 2 is included! Most people were to be found inside the shopping mall, as you might guess, where the max line had 32 moving people and 21 static in 100 meters. The bus terminal by the railway station, at the other end of the district, came in at 13 people moving and 17 static in 100 meters. The scary thing though was the discovery, that 81% of the lines walked had less than 3 people/100 meter, moving and static taken together. And close to 50% of the lines had less that 1 person/100 meters in all. Most of the lines were empty or almost empty most of the time. Of the people that anyhow were there, on average there were 18% more women than men, and very few children. This tendency was the same both for moving and static people.

In Skarpnäck, that has the largest number of residents, the average number of people coming against you is 1,6 in 100 meters and the static people are 2,6 in 100 meters. That is an average of 4,3 people all in all - very close to the average in Høje Tåstrup, but with no shopping mall and no large railway terminal in the area. Most moving people are to be found at the central part of the major boulevard inside the district, Skapnäck's Allé, with up to 8,2 people/100 meters coming against you. In the most intense part of central streets and squares, you might also find on average of 2 to 4 static people/100 meters. 16% of the all the lines in Skarpnäck have less than 1,0 people - moving and static together, and 56% of the lines has less than 3 people/100 meters. Of the remaining 44% of the movement lines, the 16% are in courtyards with many small children playing, mainly because of childcare institutions there. Most of the movement lines in these courtyards are also quite short, so standardised numbers/100 meters gives a distorted impression of the actual activities. Anyhow, this leaves us with only 28% of the lines with a 'normal' public life above 3 people/100 meters for moving and static people taken together. Not much for a compact new urban district with 9000 residents and a floor area ratio of 1,0.

In Skarpnäck there is 15% more women outdoors than men, the major difference from Høje Tåstrup being the far greater percentage of the people outdoors that are children, especially static (i.e. playing) children. In Skarpnäck 50% of all observed people outdoors are children, while in Høje Tåstrup (including the shopping mall) the children are only 11% of the observed people

Table 1 Average number of people/100 meters on movement lines in Høje Tåstrup and Skarpnäck

(pedestrians + bicyclists), 1995, average through the day

	Moving against you	Static in space	All
Egebjerggård	0,4	0,9	1,3
Høje Tåstrup including mall & station	2,8	1,6	4,4
Skarpnäck	1,6	2,6	4,3

Table 2 Maximum number of people/100 meters on movement lines in Høje Tåstrup and Skarpnäck

(pedestrians + bicyclists), 1995, average through the day

	Moving against you	Static in space	All
Egebjerg Bygade shopping section	4	3	7
Høje Tåstrup - inside shopping mall	32	21	53
Skarpnäck - part of central boulevard	8	1	9

Table 3 Percentage of movement lines with very few people (pedestrians + bicyclists,

both moving against you and static in space), 1995

	less than 3 persons/100 meters	less than 1 person/100 meters	average length of walked lines, meters
Egebjerggård	87 %	55 %	55
Høje Tåstrup	81 %	50 %	75
Skarpnäck	56 %	16 %	61

As you might expect, the number of people/100 meters is less in Egebjerggård, that is less densely built. The some degree the built density and the number of moving people seem to scale, when Egebjerggård and Skarpnäck are compared.[2]

Over all, the main conclusion is that most of the urban spaces are rather little used.

It is not because of heavy car traffic, spoiling the local environment, that public life is week. All the areas have traffic calming and different measures to prevent through traffic - in most of the places most of the time there is only few moving cars.

To test another approach than moving and static people along lines, the most central street crossings and 'squares' were studied in another ways as well. A kind of 'mental carpet' was imagined there, and every pedestrian or bicyclist coming in 'on to the carpet' was counted. If they entered a shop at the edge of the 'carpet', they were counted coming out of the shop as well, some of them in practice being counted twice or more. With this way of looking at public life at central nodes in the districts, it was possible to reach levels of more than 1000 people/hour in the afternoon rush period in all of the districts except Egebjerggård, where you got about 600-800 people/hour as a maximum..

In the three districts with railway or underground stations much of the urban life is pulled that way, while in Egebjerggård, that is only serviced by buses, urban life related to public transportation is more dispersed to and from several bus stops. This was also the case in Skarpnäck before the underground station opened there in 1994. The opening of the station then gave an increase of about 20% of movement on the central boulevard, as people preferred to walk or bike longer to a more efficient means of public transportation.

As in the much more studied downtowns and shopping malls, the urban life activity in the new districts mentioned here, is rather cyclical, varying with time of the day and day in the week. There are peaks in the morning and in the afternoon on weekdays, and sometimes also a little peak around lunchtime. Even where dwellings dominate, weekend activity is generally lower than weekdays.

The opening hours of shops play a role for the distribution or concentration of shoppers in time. In the beginning of the observation period, 10 years ago, legal shopping hours in Denmark were much shorter than in Sweden. This created a more noticeable peak of shoppers e.g. in Egebjerggård than in Skarpnäck. Later, the shopping hours have been prolonged in Denmark, and the shopping peak hours in Egebjerggård is no longer as important as before - this also means less probability of chance encounters.[3]

Compared to downtown areas, the new urban districts might have a more stable level of outdoor activity independent of the seasons, because most of the activity in the new districts are routine activities, which take place all the year around. This has yet to be analysed though.

The kind of activities you find in public space in the new districts are related to journeys to and from work, children walking or biking to school (the ones under school age accompanied by a parent), a little bit of rather local and daily kind of shopping, walking the dog, some jogging, an occasional meal at the local pizzeria, and the like. Children plays in designated playgrounds, especially if close to institutions for children or if there are extraordinary facilities. It happens that people, by chance, meet and talk, but as public life is thin, the probability of unplanned meetings is small too.

On rare occasions you might also find district festivities - once a year in Egebjerggård and maybe - maybe not in Skarpnäck. When the festival heydays in Skarpnäck were at their best, in 1993 to 1995, more than 2000 people an hour walked up and down the central boulevard for several days in a row. Later the yearly festival there moved out into the green fields and almost died.

All the numbers above are from countings in the 1990's. Renewed investigations in 2002-2003 show daily patterns and activity levels that are much the same, or in some spaces even a little lower, with the major exception of the central part of Södra station, that now has to be included in the Stockholm central places of citywide importance, and with a downtown like nightlife too. Skarpnäck has changed the most, though not in numbers overall but in the percentage of immigrants, ethnic diversity, a peek of teenage residents and a rather severe growth of crime.

Walking and biking urbanity

Walking or biking in the city is not just a question of numbers though, or what kind of specific purpose your tour has. It is also one of the possible ways to get to know your world, to learn something new, or to experience something unexpected. It could also be an unplanned meeting with someone you know but have not talked to for some time. Or a possibility to show some aspect of yourself and your abilities to others. All this includes exchange of cultural signals of different kinds. In an urban setting this might be related to the notion of 'urbanity'.

Modern urban planning from the CIAM of the 1920s onward, have had little interest in urbanity. The focus has been on practical functionality and a limited, minimalist repertoire of special aesthetic expressions. Urbanity as a quality in the city in, its own right, has also been poorly understood at a scientific level, even if a lot cities in the last 20-25 years have tried to market themselves with notions on great urban experiences there. If you really are going to understand urbanity, I think the city has to do with an elementary social and cultural playing field, where things that happen can be seen in the perspective of information theory, interrelated networks, game theory and the emerging understanding of complexity and chaos.

As far as I know, a systematic, richly elaborated and empirically qualified notion urbanity still does not exist, although it is possible to find bits and pieces by many different scholars, like Johan Asplund, Henri Lefebvre, Richard Sennett, William Whyte, Bill Hillier and others.[4] My own super-short definition of urbanity would be, that urbanity is a rich information field between humans and between humans and human artefacts in public space, where the new and unexpected can happen and where it can happen in ever new combinations and in growing complexity. Related to this, urbanity also has to do with difference and the unique.

For Lefebvre and Sennett a high urbanity is desirable for political reasons, for others a high degree of urbanity might have other positive connotations, being just fun, socially stimulating, creative - or what ever. Whether you want a high degree of urbanity or not - and where - cannot be argued in general though, I think. It has to depend on the context. In relation to walking and biking, urbanity might be one of the reasons for walking more and biking more. When you look at were voluntary 'non-purpose' walking and biking takes place, just for the joy of it, you find it either in traditional city cores or in recreationally interesting places in nature. These very different settings share some of the notions in my definition of urbanity: they are both information rich, full of possibility and complexity - the difference being the very different frequency of meetings withy human exchanges and human artefacts.

So to stimulate walking and biking, you have to create an environment with either more 'urbanity', a more interesting complex nature, or some kind of working combination here of. And by the way - related to means of movement - trains and other public transportation have some space for urbanity as well, while cars have not much to do with urbanity- isolating people in fast moving containers - except in special cases like a show of exceptional vehicles.

Experiencing urbanity in the new districts

Just to count people moving and staying in public space is not enough to evaluate the quality of the environment, although it is a necessary beginning.

If you think urbanity is important for the use of public space, then it could be interesting to break up the concept of urbanity into aspects

that can be studied empirically. From the notions of urbanity mentioned above, it is possible to construct the following table, that tries to list some aspects of urbanity a little closer the practically observable. Out of the to types of relations - human /human and human/artefact - and two major kind of qualities of urbanity - human information richness and possibilities for the 'new', four fields of further observation can be generated.

Table 4 Some aspects of empirically observable urbanity (the lists can be extended)

Human/human relations

Human/artefact relation

Information rich,

rich in difference, complex, unique

Number of people walking, biking and staying, all kinds of people, people that are different, people showing off to others, people performing in public, people in pairs and groups, people talking to each other, people spending time in the context of others, people working outdoors / in public space

Buildings and builders /100 meters, ornamentation, numbers of doors, interesting shop windows, art in public space, personalised environment, front gardens, benches, a manmade place with an identity of its own

New, unexpected, unplanned,

open to initiatives

The proportion of strangers, the occurrence of chance meetings, people stopping and talking in the middle of the flow, people 'hanging out', individuals or groups 'taking over' some spaces temporarily, special events (festivals, etc.), political demonstrations, children playing in spaces not designated for them, using public space for fitness purposes

Something unfinished, possibility to alter the environment, possibilities for individuals to personalise spaces, temporary exhibitions in public space of art and/or goods, spaces that can be used in many ways

The human/human relations in the new urban district are to a large degree characterised by routine daily life activities. As mentioned earlier, the number of people in public space is also often quite low. This means urbanity is week at its very basics and that activities, coincidences and events that need numbers to happen will only happen rarely. Many spaces are also poorly designed to accommodate diverse human activity there, or there might be tendencies to prohibit unplanned initiatives, like teenagers hanging out. Information richness and 'newness' in human/human relations in public space in these districts to some degree is related to the number of foreigners - the ethnic diversity - especially in Skarpnäck. This means that you see many cultures at once on a daily basis, but so far the interaction between people from different cultures primarily happens among the children.

basis

The human/artefact relations in the new urban districts are also a quantitative question at the outset. How many different builders and how many architects have been at play there? How many different spaces are there for possible personalisation? How many shops are there, how many windows with displays? Etc. From the outset, in all of the four new districts, there have been a lot of good intentions to create variety and mixed use. When enterprises, builders, the timeframe of development, public finance, and the structure of contemporary retail come into play, though, in the construction of the new districts, the results have difficulties living up to the good intensions. A rather limited number of builders and architects, a forced development supposed to be finished in a few years, and

difficulties in reaching mixed use goals undermine urbanity in all

the districts, more or less. To take Skarpnäck as an example, in the major part of the development, the average number of urban blocks per builder and architectural firm is 8. This is a big difference from an traditional inner city situation, where you normally have several builders per block. A significant proportion of shop space have also been empty or underused for years because of too weak a customer base, unfavourable locations in the spatial structure within the district and a combination of isolated districts and traffic calming. High taxes in the Scandinavian welfare societies also contributes to difficulties for private services for ordinary people - as people have to work 5 hours to pay for 1 hour of services (after taxes), you get a do-it-yourself economy and a through-away-economy.

To create urbanity from scratch seems to be very difficult. The affluence and the high welfare levels might even contradict urbanity?

The way we live and the thresholds of urbanity

Space syntax analyses has shown, that part of the problem of little used streets and paths in new districts are related to the spatial structure, often with weak integration and too many and too short movement lines. But the spatial structure or even the built density are not enough to explain the under-use of public space in the new districts.

To get a wider picture of what has happened with the use of public space in north western Europe in the last 100 years the table below tells a dramatic story.

Table 5. Change in some urban factors in Copenhagen in a 100 years

Aspect	New working class city area 1880-1900	New district in the suburbs 1980-2000	Difference
Indoor dwelling space / person	ca. 8 sqr. meters	ca. 60 sqr. meters	7 times
Built density (FAR) Floor area ratio	ca. 2,0	ca. 0,3	7 times
Length of streets and paths / sqr. kilometre	ca. 20 kilometres (Vesterbro)	ca. 60 kilometres (Egebjerggård)	3 times
Unique 'works' / 100 meters of street (buildings, shops, art, personal decoration)	ca. 25-50	ca. 2-6	10 times
Children in school & institution 0-20 years of age	ca. 4000 hours total	over 24.000 hours total	6 times
Time spent on other media / day than public space	less than 1 hour	ca. 6 hours	6 times

Table 6. Phase Transitions of Urbanity (tentative)

Urban Phase Change

The City of People

(human / human relations)

The City of 'Works'

(human / artefact relations)

Crowding - possibly

experiential stress

more than 10.000 persons / hour,

or less than 4 sqr. meters/person

more than 10.000 / hour ?

Urban Centrality,

lower limit level

more than 1.000 persons / hour,

or 25 / 100 meters of street

more than 1000 / hour,

or 25 / 100 meters of street

Basic Urbanity,

lower limit level

at least 3 / 100 meters of street,

or 3 within 100 meters visual field

at least 10 unique houses / 100 meters of street

( street entrance oriented ) ??

Crowding starts, when the number of people in a space is so large that the average distance between people is less than an arm's length. Stress might happen when the consciousness can't cope with the amount of information. The limit of consciousness is 16 informations/second.

The lower limit of centrality as an experience of being in a central place, is when the emotional centre in the brain starts to get bored, i.e. when there is more than 4 seconds between emotional events. A continuous stimulation therefore demands at least about 1000 new inputs per hour, average (a mood can last longer though).[5]

Below a certain level, a built up area loose its urbanity, even if the statistical bureau or the urban planning classifies it as urban.[6] The largest social visual distance is about 100 meters, and 3 persons visible within that distance is the least complex social situation that is meaningful at all.[7] Public space less populated (on average) than that cannot be considered urban seen as the city of humans in public

space. A street of unique, individual, 10 meters long houses with gaps no more than 10 meters can maybe be considered as minimum urbanity of the city of creative works.[8]

Difficulties with urbanity in new districts built at the edge or beyond push forward the question of other or supplementary strategies that possibly can have a greater success, i.e. a gradual addition and restructuring of nodes and streets outside of the city centre, where the preconditions for a development of the wanted qualities already exists to some extent.

Bo Grönlund, June 9, 2004

PS. This paper will be complemented with more facts and an illustrated Powerpoint presentation at the conference. The extra material will be made available on my homepage or through a link there after the conference. Have a look then at http://bo.gronlund.homepage.dk/

[1] On my homepage http://bo.gronlund.homepage.dk/ I have described these four urban districts in more detail and with many illustrations. In English - in reverse chronological order:

For the International Space Syntax Symposium in 2003: http://homepage.mac.com/bogronlund/posterSSS4.pdf

For the 2002 Copenhagen exhibition 'Fields of urban research' - se 'The informational City.....' at: http://www.karch.dk/udgivelser/publikationer/ShowPublication.asp?intPublicationID=88&strLanguage=UK

For the 1996 Egebjerggård housing exhibition: http://hjem.get2net.dk/gronlund/BoibyUK.html

For the Nordic Journal of Architectural Research, 1993: http://hjem.get2net.dk/gronlund/Life_and_complexity.html

In Danish, the whole 2002 exhibition contribution with many more illustrations is available at:

http://homepage.mac.com/bogronlund/BG_udstil_layout_400x200v3.pdf

A 2002 report in Danish on Egebjerggård from the Danish Building Research institute http://www.by-og-byg.dk/ is in .pdf format at: http://www.by-og-byg.dk/showfile.aspx?IdGuid={51ADFC28-85BD-4622-9A2A-9FDBB5F737DE}&CollectionId={8041B1F6-6ECB-43E8-AB1A-F345F7F2DFCE}

In Swedish there is also an illustrated paper on the issues of mixed functions in the four areas from a Chalmer's Technical University 2002 conference: http://hjem.get2net.dk/gronlund/Blandstad_Chalmers_2002.pdf

[2] The Høje Tåstrup averages are deformed by the shopping mall and remaining unbuilt land.

[3] The shop opening hours for supermarkets are still different in Denmark and Sweden, though, closing at 20:00 and 22:00 hours respectively. This still makes a difference for the distributions of pedestrians in time and space.

[4] Se my lecture notes on new urban theory developed by 'non-architects: http://hjem.get2net.dk/gronlund/3_314_Eng_v3_march2002.htm

[5] According to Tor Nørretranders

[6] According to the Danish and Swedish Statistical Bureaus, an urban areas has at least 200 inhabitants and a maximum of 200 meters between houses. Concerning the notion of 'urbanity' this makes no sense.

[7] 2 people, only, is not a complex social situation - you can also say that 2 people concerns morality, 3 people and more concern ethics.

[8] These issues need to be considered nor only in Scandinavia, but also in the US, where the movement for 'The New Urbanism' only partly have taken them into account - and then basically at the artefact, low urbanity level.