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Egebjerggård, Ballerup, Copenhagen Metropolitan Region, Denmark
Høje Tåstrup, Copenhagen Metropolitan Region, Denmark
Skarpnäck, Stockholm, Sweden
Södra Stationsområdet, Stockholm, Sweden

 

Bo Grönlund:

The informational city and the street as urban form
- 4 new urban districts and urbanity

(Catalogue text from the exhibition Fields of Urban Research, School of Architecture, Copenhagen)

 

A quest for more 'cityness' - also in new urban districts - broke though in Scandinavia together with postmodernism 25 years ago. I Copenhagen well known examples are Egebjerggård in Ballerup and the new station district in Høje Tåstrup. In Stockholm the showpiece was Skarpnäck and later the Södra Station district. In Malmö there is also the new Bo01 area and in Copenhagen the Ørestad project is now under construction.

The goals about 'cityness' 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.

Several architectural reviewers and social scientists have expressed disappointment with the result of these urban projects and interviews with the residents show a preference for natural environment in relation to the dwelling.

The question of 'cityness' suffers from a relatively week theoretical underpinning. Architects often see the urban as special formal typologies and floor area ratios, while other professions emphasise human actions, forms of life, public conversation, diversity, coincidence, the topology of the movement networks, etc. If goals for 'cityness' shall be meaningful and possible to evaluate in practice, a greater agreement on the concept is needed, although it should not be too rigorous and probably never can be complete.

To Johan Asplund urbanity is first of all a great potential for unplanned events and coincidences, which can create new possibilities and resources. To him the degree of urbanity also has to with a readiness to let these events have an influence on the further lifelines of the people involved.

William Whyte's empirical studies points in the same direction. He shows that people like a high density of other people and events, rich sensuous stimuli and also crowding.

Henri Lefebvre is critical about modern urbanism, which has undermined urban life and contributed to an abstract space. To him, urbanity has to do with meetings of difference, life and play, speech and conversation - also with strangers - and the use of all the senses. The city, its buildings, art and human lives should be seen as works (in French 'oeuvre') - contrary to routine production and profit.

Richard Sennett is most concerned about the importance of urbanity for social coherence and development of solidarity. He sees the preconditions for a greater empathy on the confrontation with difference in real life. Situations where this can happen should be promoted. It will also give richer lives and more meaningful personal development.

Bill Hillier works with computer analyses of spatial networks and correlations between different spatial and other circumstances to find parameters of urbanity. Strong relationships have been found between the relative number of pedestrians and spatial integration in the movement networks. A high average for spatial integration combined with a proper local variation is a common property of traditional Western cities and towns with deformed grids. This topology was discarded in modern urbanism.

The project 'The informational city and the street as urban form - 4 new urban districts and urbanity' investigates urbanity as the city of people and the city of 'works' respectively. Both of these are also studied in relation to spatial topologies, e.g. with Hillier's methods. The focus is primarily on difference and possibilities of experience in public space, but also the mix of shops and private firms with other functions, which seems difficult to get.

 

The four districts of investigation:
Egebjerggård, Høje Tåstrup, Skarpnäck and Södra Station

The planning for Høje Tåstrup and Skarpnäck was initiated in the late 1970's, and for Egebjerggård and Södra Station in the 1980's. The first tenants moved in about 7 years later. Skarpnäck was almost fully developed around 1989, while construction continued into the late 1990's in the other districts. Høje Tåstrup still have some centrally located empty building lots.

The size of the districts is fairly similar. They all have elements of an urban block structure containing some 25 to 40 blocks, the least in Egebjerggård where the spatial pattern is most open. Maximum floor area ratios permitted are 0.4 in Egebjerggård, 0.8 in Høje Tåstrup, 1.0 in Skarpnäck and 2.0 in Södra Station. Including traffic and green areas, the floor area ratio is lower - although not in the last case, which is an inner city infill. In Egebjerggård the floor area ratio a whole is close to 0.25 only. The number of residents varies from in the hundreds in Høje Tåstrup to about 9000 in Skarpnäck. On the other hand, Høje Tåstrup has many privately employed people working there.

All the districts have had extraordinary excellent planning conditions: often publicly owned land for development, strong public planning offices, architectural competitions, planning consultants and contributing architects with a good reputation and eager politicians wanting the very best.

Spatial structure
The inspiration for the new districts was meant to be spatial forms of the traditional European city. To some extent this can be seen in the built result. Many spatial solutions show a continued modern inheritance though - undermining urbanity. The new districts are often isolated islands in the urban landscape. Though fare is normally limited or stopped. Instead of an grid with 'ringyness', the traffic system is fractal like the branches of a tree, at least for cars. Space syntax analyses shows that the most integrated street in e.g. Skarpnäck is not the 'main street' in the middle, but a street at the edge with better connections to surrounding roads. Concerning pedestrians, the movement lines are often too many and too short, dispersing people as well as making them disappear in a few of seconds. In Høje Tåstrup the most important space faces inward - the shopping centre square in City2 - while the complex as a whole turns its backs and vast traffic areas towards surrounding districts all the way around. A diagonal connection to the railway station is also missing.

People in public space
The attempted liveliness of people in public space is difficult to get in the new districts. The most central places in Høje Tåstrup close to the station, in Skarpnäck and in the Södra Station district have a throughput of pedestrians and bicyclists of a maximum of about 1000 people per hour, if all movement is counted. This coincides with Whyte's lowest observed level of experience of a being in a central place, but with the difference that the Scandinavian cases in question here mainly has people in a hurry on their way home - with little interest in unexpected meetings. In Egebjerggård the maximum number of people close to the shops are about 500 an hour. Most streets, roads and pedestrian lanes in the four districts have much less people though. On systematic observation walks the major impression is spaces empty of people.

Services and businesses in the districts
The public services are by international standards very good: public transportation, schools and day care, cultural facilities and libraries, care of the old and week. All of this can be determined politically, even if priorities to some extent varies - also through time. In the early 1990's Skarpnäck e.g. had about 1000 people locally employed in the public sector there - to serve 9000 residents. It was somewhat extreme with both a district community administration experiment and a high rate of special dwellings for people with disabilities, but the number indicates the important role of the public sector in the new urban districts not only as local services bus also as local employment.

Dreams of many small businesses along the major streets have greater difficulties becoming a reality, or the result is less interesting. Only food stores, hairdressers and restaurants thrive. Other close down either because of too few customers, typically shops with clothing, or because of restructurings as has happened to the banks and the post office. Some shops and office spaces are empty for long periods of time, especially in locations with little through movements of people or cars. Offices often have 'Venetian blinds', curtains, etc. permanently prohibiting view and contributes little to urban life. In Høje Tåstrup not even a little Netto discount supermarket can survive at the square just to the south of the station. This district has surrendered to big business in the form of the major Danish telecom TDC and Danske Bank, who occupies about half of the blocks - with glazed streets of their own at +15 and their own canteens, in order that people employed can stay in all day long.

Architectural expression
The architectural variety is large in Egebjerggård, mostly through different clusters of 'low-dense' housing. In Høje Tåstrup the program prescribes a strait angled, modest classicism with strict rules for a unified use of brick, colour and building height. Skarpnäck is planned as a rather enclosed whole with walls of red brick. The plan is straight angled here too, though in a less rigid way and with facades looking somewhat like the Nordic functionalism that superseded the 'white' international style of early modernism. The Södra Station district is built in several levels, a large part on a deck standing on rubber feet above a major railway and with buildings in several styles.

All the four districts shows a willingness to promote urbanity through urban design, but the architecture as such have created few good meeting places. The 'urbanity' aspects of the architecture have become more formalistic than catalytic in relation to the promotion of human events, the unexpected and the different. More spaces of urbanity and a more intense use of these could have been created though an architecture more knowledgeable of essential urban issues today. When urbanity anyhow works to some extent, it sometimes happens in spite of the architecture - because of many people by the stations, multiethnicity, the provision of buildings for cultural purposes and the like. Only Fatbursparken in the Södra Station district and the linkage to Medborgarplatsen are major urban resources supported by the architecture. Some of the architecture in the rest of Södra Station, and in Høje Tåstrup and Skarpnäck is rather monotonous or uninteresting and the urban spaces often too large, too small, to windy or mainly facing the wrong direction. Several blocks often look almost the same and the traditional division of one block into several building lots for different builders have been replaced by a habit of allocating several blocks in chunks to the same builder, especially in Skarpnäck and Høje Tåstrup.

 

New strategies for urbanity outside of the old urban cores?

To promote urbanity 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.

Difficulties with urbanity in new districts built at the edge or beyond push forward the question of other or supplementary strategies. Some Swedish towns, e.g. Karlstad and Västerås have started out on a route to increased urbanity that possibly can have a greater success - a gradual addition and restructuring of nodes and streets outside of the centre, where the preconditions for a development of the wanted qualities already exists to some extent. It is too early to evaluate those attempts at the moment though, as they have not come very far.

Background:
This research project started as part of a research education at Nordplan in Stockholm and is today besides to the School of Architecture in Copenhagen also related to the School of Architecture in Lund. The city of Stockholm and the local Danish governments in Ballerup and Høje Tåstrup
have contributed with knowledge and material. Research grants have been given by the Danish State Research Counsel for Social Studies, The Swedish Building Research Counsel, The Danish Ministry of Culture and others.

References:

Johan Asplund: Storstäderna och det fortanska livet, 1992
William H. Whyte: City - rediscovering the Centrer, 1988
Henri Lefebvre: Writings on Cities, 1996
Richard Sennet: The Conscience of the Eye, 1990
Bill Hillier: Space is the Machine, 1996
Ann Skantze: Tillhörighet och Främlingsskap, 1996 (on Skarpnäck)
Arkitekten publishers (editor): Egebjerggård, Housing Exhibition, bo i by, 1996
By & Byg (editor): Livet i Egebjerggård, 2002 (forthcoming)
Jette Fuglsig Mogenensen & Dorte Burlaos: Idealer, planer & virkelighed, 2002 (on Høje Tåstrup - final exam project, The Danish Technical University)
Carsten Bergendahl (editor): Fatburen 3000 år, 1992 (on the Södra Station district)
Elisabeth Lilja: Den ifrågasatta förorten, 1999 (on the Södra Station district)
Lars Marcus: Architectural Knowledge and urban Form, 2000 (on the Södra Station district)

Bo Grönlund's exhibition display - an overview (the original is 2 by 4 meters)
 
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