Castles and kings

Atop the cannon tower at Kromborg

The past eight days my old friend Kevin Applegate was visiting me here in Copenhagen. It's a good time to do it, since the person I'm sharing the apartment is gone on vacation for a whole month and won't be back until the first of October.

We traveled outside of the city twice, to the Viking Longship Museum at Roskilde and the Kromborg castle at Helsingør and had a lot of fun inside the city as well, especially at Freetown Christiania. We hadn't seen each other in at least 8 years, and hadn't kept up regularly in more than 10. Kevin's been in London getting a Master's degree in applied linguistics - essentially in teaching English to non-native speakers - from King's College. He spent the previous six years working as an English teacher in South Korea.

It is quite nice to reconnect with someone you knew growing up on a completely different side of the world. To speak of common acquaintances and familiar neighborhoods while exploring a new city and meeting people from places you used to think were so very far away.

Below are a few pictures from the last week. They are not well organized because arranging photos on Blogger is awful. Apologies. Here's a link to the whole album if you are interested.

Car-free day on the coolest bridge in town

The  longest longship in the world

Oiger Danske - the sleeping hero of Denmark who will awake in the hour of their greatest need. 

In the spiral tower above Christiania

Round Tower observatory

Bird Island in Christiania

Urban Development of Copenhagen to 1807

-This is a section I'm writing to help me understand the history of Copenhagen before the development of my specific study blocks. The writing is a bit drier than I would usually use for the blog. Maybe it's better, who knows. A fair amount will be redundant with what I posted in the "Livability, Gehl, What I'm Doing Here etc" post.

It is important to understand the history of Copenhagen’s development in order to understand the relationships between districts, their evolution over time, and the evolution of housing types that appeared within these districts. In this section I will briefly outline Copenhagen’s history, in order to situate the case studies within it.

Land

Copenhagen is located on the eastern edge of the island called Zealand in Denmark and spans to the adjacent smaller Amager Island. Zealand is the largest island in Denmark, and lies between the peninsula of Jutland, the largest body of land in Denmark, and Sweden. Between it and Sweden runs the Øresund, the most favorable channel for navigation between the North Sea and the Baltic.

In general Denmark is a very flat country, with few hills and shallow coastal waters. This has meant that it is relatively easy to build artificial land in the midst of coastal waters, creating a very malleable coastline that has been extensively shaped by human artifice over time. This is especially true in Copenhagen, large sections of which are on land “reclaimed” from the sea.

pretty flat

Early Development 1200-1600

In the 11^th century Copenhagen (København), initially known simply as Havn (“harbor”), appeared as a fishing village. Its favorable location on the Øresund led to its growth as a town and an increasingly important port. It was given by the King of Denmark to the bishops of Roskilde to rule in 1169. The bishops constructed a castle in the 12^th century on a small island in the harbor which came to be known as Slotsholmen (“castle island”). Stone walls were built enclosing the town in the 13^th century. As the town rose in importance in international trade, it entered into conflict with the Hansa league, which functioned as a German shipping cartel and sought to control trade routes in the Baltic. The city’s defenses were overrun and the castle destroyed in 1369 by the Hanse, and further wars with the league took place in the early 15^th century.

               The city walls concentrated urban life in a limited area. Three gates: west, north, and east, were the only entry points to the city and were locked in the evening. The footprint of these walls, routes leading to and from the gates, and the internal street grid of the medieval town are still evident in the built form of the city. A new castle was built on the ruins of Slotsholmen in the late 14^th century, which was occupied by the king in 1416 when the city was reclaimed from the bishops by the royal crown. The site of the castle became the seat of power of the Danish state and continues to be until the present day. By the year 1500 the city’s population was only about 5,000.

Renaissance City 1600 – 1807

Amalienborg Palace and guard

Throughout the 16^th century the city grew in prominence as a port and national capitol. In 1648, after centuries of being elected by leading nobles, the Danish crown became a hereditary absolute monarchy. The consolidation of state power in the city lead had important effects on its development, particularly in the increasingly elevated profile of the monumental architecture of the state and in the social and economic effect of the professional class of bureaucrats, soldiers, and sailors that came to reside in the city. In the late 16^th century the city fortifications were expanded and shallow harbor areas were filled in, approximately doubling the city’s size. Later, areas of the harbor would be filled in further increasing the land area of the fortified city. These new areas of the city, the largest of which was to the north of the old town, were platted with a rational grid of streets in contrast to the winding pattern characteristic of the medieval center.

City walls, streets, and developed areas as of 1535 in orange, as of 1750 in pink. 

Nyboder

This renaissance quarters of the town reflects the expansion in state power that took place during this period. The Nyboder (“new houses) complex of rowhouses were constructed beginning in 1631 to house the personnel of the increasingly important Royal Danish Navy. Nyhavn (“new harbor) was developed in the 1670’s as a harbor, mercantile exchange, and maritime gateway to the city via Kongens Nytorv (“King’s new square”), a major civic plaza. North of Nyhavn, the Frederisktaaden area was developed in the early 18^th century, featuring the city’s hospital, bourgeoisie mansions and the sumptuous Amalienborg palace complex for the royal family.

Nyhavn

Meanwhile, the island of Slotholmen was expanded considerably and developed with new state buildings, notably the Børsen stock exchange which was constructed in 1640 along with harbor and military facilities. The old castle was rebuilt as Christiansborg Palace in the 1745.

Børsen, with its awesome dragon spire

The 18^th century proved to be rich in catastrophes for the city of Copenhagen. The cumulative effect of this was to wipe most of the city clean of its medieval building stock and to launch a major period of reconstruction over a relatively short period of time. The city was hit by plague in 1711 which reduced the population by a third [need source]. This was followed by the Great Fire of 1728 which consumed most of the old town as well as the old castle on Slotsholmen. A second Great Fire occurred in 1794, which again burned most of the old core as well as some of the more recently developed areas to the south and east. Many important civic buildings which were rebuilt after the first fire were again destroyed in 1794, including Christiansborg Palace and the City Hall.

Finally, in 1807 heavy artillery bombardment by the British Royal Navy and an ensuing fire destroyed several important monuments most of the areas of the old town that had been spared from the fire of 1794. The population of the city rose to about 60,000 by 1750 and 100,000 in 1800.

Generalized ethesia

How does one experience culture?
At the broadest level, you sort of float in it. It's all around you and you can vaguely perceive it's nature based on how you float... Maybe it's viscous, maybe it's acidic, maybe it's transparent, maybe it's warm, maybe it's dense and you float right to the top.

You live in another country and you get this sensation that culture is going around all around you, and you're aware of it because it's different from what you're used to. You can't know very much about any particular aspect of it, because it's in a language you don't understand and draws on knowledge and traditions and inside jokes that you just don't get. But you have a diffuse feeling of awareness, the way you do about everything else that is new and different, the way you do about putting on a new shoes or pajamas that are fresh out of the dryer. It's probably this generalized esthesia I experience when traveling that makes me feel I'm closer to God than at any other time.

~

I'm an American in Europe, which is a thing I've never been before. I study the buildings, I read history, but I also hear the music and watch movies and TV. Of course, I watch more American and British movies because they're in English. I am biased in that way. You get this idea about America, though, of the role it plays in the culture here. There's the huge political and economic forces it represents, but those things run under the surface hard to distinguish most of the time. More often, the cultural products of America arrive here, in the form of music, movies, fashions, craft beer (Yakima {here pronounced Yak-KEE-mah} Valley hops FTW) and ideas and they have this quality of freshness, of rawness, of cultural mixing, of a compelling and somewhat subversive sincerity of emotion. It is more attractive for its peculiar foreignness, which provides a romantic setting for a hazy fantasy.

Back home, we drown in newness, it feels like we have no roots, like we are so mixed that we're just a mess, and those massive economic and political forces are much more visceral. We romanticize older cultures for their stability, their unique customs, their roots, their integrity. Songs, books and film from Europe especially provide a conveniently strange, yet intelligible stage for romance of a world with less disruption, slower paces, life at a more human scale.

I love that people are like this, that they look to other cultures with curiosity and awe. (Side Bar: When is it awe and curiosity but not contempt or fear?)
Being from Seattle, I am exotic here in a way that I did not expect. It's not a particularly important city globally. Most folks don't know that Microsoft and Amazon are based there, or I suppose, they don't care. They know about Starbucks, though. But it represents some mountainous, mossy green fringe on the faraway edge of the easily understood. And coffee and beer too.

I got started thinking about this after seeing Captain Fantastic at a theater here. It's a movie that represents two very different sides of peculiarly American culture. The house was packed.

Valle, Indre By, Gehl, "Livability", What I'm doing

So, what is it that I am actually doing here?

I am studying in Copenhagen on a Valle scholarship, a program created to foster engagement between scholars at the UW and in Scandinavia. It is open to graduate students from UW and from any of the partner schools in Scandinavia or the Baltic States in built environments, civil engineering, and environmental engineering. As an urban planning student I fall within the UW's College of Built Environments, and was able to apply to study in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania or Denmark. I ultimately applied to conduct an independent study on housing in Copenhagen, Denmark on the advice of a few enthusiastic boosters of that city, and was able to arrange a guest researcher position at Aalborg University's branch here through some luck and generous referals (Thanks Bry!).

My project is to study housing in the context of a "livable", compact city.

Copenhagen is compact. Copenhagen is about two and a half times as densely populated in Seattle. That means the entire population of their city (plus the jobs and parks and infrastructure and everything else) fits into about a third of the area of Seattle. Copenhagen's population is about 6/7 of Seattle's (591,000 / 684,000), so it's pretty close.

That means there is much more room for farms and natural areas surrounding the city. It means more efficient heating and other utilities and less costly public infrastructure. It also means it's much easier to get from one side of the city to another. Transit is good in Copenhagen, but the city's bike lane network is incredible. Cycling is the most popular way to get around the city, accounting for about 45% of all trips. Again, this is possible because the city is, physically, not that large. Together all this makes Copenhagen one of the most sustainable cities in the developed world.

Copenhagen is also renowned for it's "livability". Livability is a peculiar term that refers to how easy and how enjoyable it is to live in a place. It refers to the number and quality of parks, useful and exciting businesses, engaging cultural events and quality of social services that are present and easily accessible in a place. Copenhagen has been ranked #1 globally in livability in 2014, 2013 and 2008. That was by a magazine called "Monocle" which I had never heard of, and I'm not going to pretend this is a rigorous measurement. Still, it means something about how the city is perceived by locals and the global community.

The goal of my project is to profile the housing that supports this relatively high density while maintaining (and/or promoting) such a high standard of urban life. What is it like? How is it laid out? When was it built? Who built it? Why did they design it the way they did? Who owns it? What are the regulations that govern it? How much does it cost?

I want to know these things because I think it is important for Seattle to learn how to be a denser city in the 21st century without degrading our quality of life. Conversations about density in Seattle tend to devolve into nightmare scenarios of New York ghettos or soviet gulags, which is a little bit hilarious, but also unfortunate. Because of our cultural, technological, and historical context out west we are used to a very spread out way of living. This can be nice, but it has real consequences there are other ways of living more compactly that are not like a soviet gulag. This is what I want to learn.

I'm applying these questions to different areas around town. The first neighborhood I've been looking at it the oldest part of the city, called Indre By ("Inner City" in English {linguistically I think by is related to the word "build" in English which in Danish is bygge. Also the by in "bylaws" comes from the same root.}).

Indre By was the whole city up until about 1850, but was first built up in the late middle ages. It has an excellent natural harbor and strategic location on shipping routes meant that the town grew fairly quickly, and by 1500 it was a walled city with a population of about 5,000.

The walls were expanded during the early 1600's and ultimately demolished in the mid 1800's, but the heart of the city has maintained the small, tight grid of curving serpentine streets and compact public squares of its early days.

The blocks here are small, and they have very high building coverage. Though the street and block pattern of this part of the city dates back to medieval times, the building stock mostly does not. The city burned down twice during the 1700's, and was heavily bombarded by the British during the Napoleonic wars. An old church survives from 1474 and there are a number of houses from the 1600's, including the famous Nyhavn row:

 but the most of the buildings in this part of town date from around 1795-1850.

These buildings are blocks of flats that front on the street and have small interior courtyards. Historically the small courtyards in this part of town were used for keep livestock, privies and light industry; today they are mostly used for bicycle parking, storage, utilities and dumpsters. The courtyards provide access to more apartment buildings inside the block called backbuildings. Almost all buildings are between three and five stories. They tend to be quite compact. On the block I measured, their widths vary between 7.5 and 18 meters wide (about 25 to 60 feet), with an average width of about 12 meters (40 feet). The apartments are reached by stairwells, which typically access two apartments per floor. Larger buildings have multiple stairwells to reach more apartments. Some buildings have been retrofitted with small elevators, but I believe this is uncommon.

The density of windows and entrances, the narrowness of the buildings and their variation in facade color and treatment, the narrowness of the streets, their cobblestone pavement, their liveliness, and the many small businesses all tend to reward the pedestrian with a very stimulating and enjoyable environment. It is visually pleasing as well as mentally stimulating because there are many things going on, and you have to look at each one to try and figure out what it is.

Strædet, one of the first streets that went car-free in Copenhagen

Many of the streets and squares in this area have been gradually converted to pedestrian-only streets (plus relaxed cyclists). This transformation was spearheaded by the architect and urban planner Jan Gehl, who is the most famous Dane among people like me. Strangely, most Danes have not heard of him. Gehl made his career working on the seemingly obvious idea that people and their experiences matter.

Yesterday I got to join with a group from my university who is in town for two weeks on the "Gehl Studio" trip, in which they will study the city and then try to bring their insights home to apply to a project in the Seattle area. We visited the Gehl Architects office and heard a presentation about their work and methods to document human activity in public places (walking, sitting, playing, talking, watching) and to design places that promote and protect such behavior. Much of it was familiar to me from years as a planning/urban design/active streets nerd, but something about the nature of the common-place, low-intensity behavior that they seek to document means it easily slips out of the front of one's mind.

Before/After: one of the streets in Copenhagen banned to cars

The work they do to develop clear methods and measurement criteria and to communicate effectively is all the more important for how seemingly mundane the subject is. As they said in the presentation: You must measure what you value. Things like automobile counts, speeds and gas prices are easy to measure and we're used to hearing about them. Measurements yield data and data influences policy, especially because it gives politicians cover when pressed on the results of their spending programs.

What is revolutionary about this method, is a reevaluation of which are the things are truly valued, and make sure that these are the qualities we are measuring and seeking to promote through policy and design. The effect of this philosophy, along with much hard work by Danes whose names I don't know, has yielded a city with exceedingly pleasant qualities to pass through at a slow speed, immerse oneself in its fascinating places, spend time socializing with friends or family, visit as a tourist, or simply to be a person around other people.

It's people-habitat. It's compact and livable. Gehl and others have effectively documented the magic that happens in the streets. But what about that which surrounds the streets, equally as mundane, the places where the walkers and cyclists and shop owners and AirBnB toursits begin and end each day? The boring vernacular architecture of the guts of the city, usually not designed by any architect, but built to fill the needs of the day by craftsman who learned their skills on the job from their more experienced peers. It's form, cost, location, relationship to the neighborhood and type of ownership all bear on how it fulfills its function. Clearly, something about it works well here.

That's what I'm here to learn about.


[Update: Google Photos made this silly video of things I captured during my tour around town with the Gehl Studio group. It's actually kind of cool.]

I dag

September! Happy Labor Day (has that happened yet?)!

I am still here, still alive, working, consolidating, expanding my zone of comfort in this strange wonderful city, of 2.3ish million people (metropolitan area), the capital of the Danes (total population 5.7 million), on the Øresund - the narrow connection between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea/Atlantic Ocean via Skagerak (the coolest word) and Kattegat, a flat green country, a member or the European Union and the Schengen zone passport control area, built of bricks and stone, populated by unnervingly attractive people, where the sun has just set on the first day in September.

 

I am in my room, in a small apartment which I am sharing with Renato, a 46-year old Sicilian man and his incredibly sweet dog named Cesar. It is on the fourth floor (in the USA we would say the fifth floor) of a mid-century walk-up apartment building, part of a group of buildings of many vintages that enclose a large courtyard with a playground in the center, a housing type that dominates most of Copenhagen and is one of the subjects of my curiosity and study here.

The apartment block where I live

The apartment is in Nørrebro (pronounced "noy-bro" I believe) and it is probably the most diverse neighborhood in Copenhagen. There is a large muslim population, meaning there are many middle-eastern markets, shwarma shops, and there is a large mosque which was recently constructed several blocks away. It is also a youngish, lower-income neighborhood. It might be in danger of gentrifying. It is one of the historic inner-ring quarters of Copenhagen, and is named for its historic relationship to the "northern" gate in the city fortifications - Nørreport.

Old city gates

This neighborhood, along with Østerbro, Vesterbro, Frederiskburg and Christianshavn was quickly built up by the rapidly growing population of the industrializing city of the mid to late 1800's, and linked to the downtown via street cars.

I am very happy to be in an apartment after two weeks spent in hostels, searching for an apartment and living out of my suitcase and backpack.  I have never stayed in hostels in a place where there are so many of them and so many travelers. While there are many young people travelling Europe for pleasure, the hostels also served a number of people like myself who were looking for longer-term housing. I am fairly lucky that I got a place as soon as I did, given how few openings there were and how many frantic students were fighting over each one.

The hostel time was fun to meet people from all over (mostly: Germany, Italy, the UK, and Spain. Also some folks from the USA, Canada, and Argentina). People mostly younger than myself, some in college, some about to begin college, some having graduated and gotten jobs and now travelling on their own. Apparently I do not look my age. Everyone is surprised that I am 29. Perhaps it is how I carry myself, that even after all my twenties I don't live much differently than I did when I was 22. I certainly have changed, but I don't have many more possessions and I have no more wealth, (though I have significantly more debt) than I did then. 

Happy, attractive young people from the UK, Netherlands, and Germany

Quick common-room conversations require you to explain who you are and how you got to this particular place, and I can't help but wonder. I am by all measures immensely lucky to be here, to have funding, to know what I love to learn about, to have the institutional backing and cultural affirmation that it is a worthwhile thing to do to learn about, to be free from a thousand things that could weigh me down and impede my freedom at this point in my life. Traveling can be a deliciously lightening experience, but living in a new place always involves a culture shock, some alienation and anxiety. That I am doing my work independently here, supported in a general way but not port of any particular group or program potentially heightens this anxiety. 

Still, whatever it is that I am, twenty-nine years old, I am a traveler. I have lived on three continents before this one. It was just over ten years ago that I returned  from South Korea (at the behest of their government). It is nine years since I learned to dance and drink rum and also played chess with Andrew Shaw Kitch in the Dominican Republic. It is three years since I came back from the Peace Corps in Paraguay. I do believe in my work, and I find it compelling, and the greatest challenge for me going forward in my time here will be to organize myself and the work I wish to do. I must visualize the work I want to do to make the project I am creating awesome, and plan the time and needed prerequisites in order to do that work.

I will attempt to lay out how I see that project in future posts. I will also try to use this blog to communicate my findings and to regularly publish bits of my work. I am excited to learn and write about the history of this city as well as its European context which is new to me. I am excited to share drawings and images I will be creating to attempt to convey what I am learning. If anyone reads this, I am grateful for your attention and for feedback and questions you may have. I have a limited amount of curiosity and ingenuity that I can deploy at any one stretch and it is wonderful to receive a bit of either from someone else.

This place is fun to draw.

Settling In

I'll have been in Copenhagen one full week as of 1pm local time.

It's such a wonderful process of disassembling and reassembling to travel, and to move to another place. I am here semi-temporarily, semi-permanently. I'm here long enough that I need to learn how to live. I'm not here long enough that I'll be able to ever get very settled.

I've made some progress though. Today I am sitting at my desk in the very modern, very Danish room where I will be working, at the Centre for Design, Innovation, and Sustainable Transitions on the second floor of the Copenhagen-branch building of the University of Aalborg. I have a monitor and a keyboard, a whole lot of desk space, a key to the coffee machine, and a guest key card.

I am a guest researcher! Neither I nor anyone else seems to know exactly how this happened, but mostly it seems to be due to the influence of a professor at the main campus, in Aalborg, who has worked closely with UW students and professors in the past and put in a simple request for an "internship" on my behalf.

I still have not found housing, I still don't have the visa I need, but having a work place where I can leave my things, with people that accept me as legitimate, is enormously reassuring.

Electioneer

I have been working temporarily in King County Elections' Accessible Voting Center in Union Station in Seattle and reading Skid Road, a history of the early days of Seattle by Murray Murphy.

Union Station is one of Seattle's two train stations. The other is King Street Station. They were built in 1911 and 1906 respectively, about a block apart from each other between the Pioneer Square and International District neighborhoods. King Street station continues to serve trains: Amtrak and Sounder commuter rail. Union Station, though adjacent to the city's light rail tracks, does not itself support any trains.

Union Station and King Street Station have both been renovated in recent years. King Street Station was renovated by the City of Seattle and King County, providing Amtrak customers an improved experience which hearkens back to the glory days of rail travel. Union Station was renovated in 2001 to serve as the headquarters of Sound Transit, the regional transit agency, with the financial backing of Paul Allen. The station had sat vacant for several decades before being renovated. It is now in impeccable condition. The building contains the executive board room for the agency, the agency's business offices, a reception desk, and publicly available bathrooms, but the gorgeous great hall remains mostly empty.

While we are working at the Accessible Voting Center people constantly ask us if this is the Amtrak station, if they can get on the train here, what is this place? We say no, you need the train station across the street, the one with the clock tower, the one that actually has trains.

When it was a train station with trains, the great hall in Union Station served as the waiting room. Today there are still giant wood benches and metal tables and chairs. People still wait there, but not for trains. Union station is perhaps the most peaceful and beautiful building open to the public in Seattle. When we arrive at 9:30am there are people on the benches, at the tables. It has nice clean bathrooms, so that is nice too. People there are waiting because they have nothing else to do. They are waiting until the shelter opens up again in the evening, waiting until they can draw their safety net benefits, waiting until they can find some kind of job, waiting until they have some other better safe place to be.

The great hall has a mosaic tile floor and a great vaulted roof, with ornamental gold mosaic patterns imprinted above decorative floral nested arches along the walls of the chamber. Light filters in through translucent overhead windows and arching windows on the south wall which frame a clock-face and the inaccurate lettering "To Concourse".

~

There was some confusion this morning about our break schedule. Today we were on the clock eight hours, and therefor were entitled to a "dinner break" in addition to our lunch break. We also got a 15 minute break in the afternoon. The people that work at the AVC tend to communicate in a reptitive,  nonconfrontational style. With our unfamiliarity with eachother and the short-term nature of our work, there are always many more of us than there is any knowledge of what we are talking about, so it takes a little while. Several coworkers attempted to find out if we should also have gotten a 15 minute break.

While this was occuring I was reading in Skid Road about the general strike that took place in Seattle in 1919, the first general strike to take place in a major city in the United States. It went on peacefully for three days before unraveling, and the strike committee ensured that the lights stayed on, hospitals could stay in operation, and riots did not occur.

Later I read about the dominance of the Teamsters union in the city lead by Dave Beck in the 30's, 40's and 50's. He developed an effective corporatist economic engine in the city, based on cooperation with business owners, violence against rival unions and price-cutters and strike-breakers, and rabid anti-communism. He was convicted in 1957 for embezzlement and labor racketeering.

King County temporary election workers are covered by the local Teamsters union.

~

Union station sits at the heart of the city's transportation networks. Bus lines, streetcar, light rail, heavy rail, freight rail all pass within a block of the building, and I-5 is only several blocks away.

As I walked back to work after my lunch break in front of the station waiting for the light was a modern, bus-looking streetcar, a bus decorated in green, brass and wood panneling to resemble a historic trolley, and a "trolley bus" (a bus running on overhead electric wires) which replaced the historic network of streetcars and trolleys in Seattle in the 1940's and 50's.