Fostering and planning urban regeneration: the governance of cultural districts in Copenhagen

ABSTRACT

Policy-makers and urban planners struggle to find the right formula to implement urban regeneration processes based on cultural assets, often focusing on the desired outcomes, but rarely questioning how the policy process can shape them. This paper examines different governance models for the implementation and organization of cultural districts, and evaluates how they can affect their actual realization by investigating three cases in Copenhagen, Denmark. The deindustrialization of Copenhagen left many of the city’s harbour areas disused and in turn provided the opportunity to develop three new cultural districts in the city centre. The paper contributes to the literature on cultural districts by matching specificities and contingencies attached to a particular urban area with the governance model adopted for its development. The paper claims that temporal experimentation has to be included in cultural planning and a mix of bottom-up and top-down approaches is more desirable than both a totally unregulated initiative and a real estate-driven development and a totally unregulated initiative, as it ensures that initiatives remain financially viable and that the creative workers and companies retain a certain control of the area development, and in turn counteracts gentrification.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural districts
• urban governance
• cultural policies
• Copenhagen

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Massimiliano Nuccio http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0751-2143

Trine Bille http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0139-166X

Notes

1 The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation; The National Film School of Denmark; Rhythmic Music Conservatory.

2 Rental Property Manager at the real estate company Aberdeen Assets Management DK.

3 Bohemian Bourgeois; a person having both the values of the counterculture of the 1960s and the materialism of the 1980s.

4 Architect and Professor at the School of Architecture. http://www.kulturarv.dk/1001fortaellinger/da_DK/flaadestation-holmen/videos/newest/1/c18dfbeb-588d-4d1b-85ef-483c8e05f23c.

5 REDA is a subsidiary of a holding owned by four pension funds. The funds bought the land and properties of Refshaleøen in 1996 as an attempt to save B&W (Børsen, 2014).

6 See Interview 10, www.lokalebasen.dk and www.refshaleoen.dk.

7 See www.musikvaerftet.net.

8 An indoor street food market with approx. 35 independent stallholders that also organizes cultural events.

9 Copenhagen Street Food, http://copenhagenstreetfood.dk/lej-en-stand/.

10 It is a mix between a museum and an activity centre for science, technology, environment and health. While improving and rebuilding its permanent venue at Hellerup, North of Copenhagen, Experimentarium has made a temporary (March 2014–May 2016) exhibition at Papirøen.