Layered Landscapes of Welfare Values – Revisiting Køge Bay Beach Park in Denmark

Abstract

This essay studies the perceived spatial characteristics of the Danish welfare landscape of Køge Bay Beach Park from the late 1970s. The project is one of the few realized examples of landscape-based coastal adaptation projects in a Danish context, and it is expected to undergo an extensive modernization process in the near future. Based on the premise that the rising sea level requires great public engagement and investments, we claim that future climate adapted coastlines could be regarded as the next generation of welfare landscapes. By using Køge Bay Beach Park as a lens, we examine the potential perceived spatial qualities of integrating welfare values in coastal adaptation projects. We further discuss how past planning and design practices of welfare landscapes could be revived in the future transformation of Køge Bay Beach Park, and in future coastal climate adaptation projects in general.

Keywords:

• welfare landscapes
• coastal landscapes
• climate change
• sea level rise
• perception of space

Geolocation Information

Copenhagen, Denmark − 55° 40′ 33.9528'' N and 12° 34′ 6.0132'' E

Notes

1. Kristoffer Lindhardt Weiss, Critical City: The Success and Failure of the Danish Welfare City (Copenhagen: Danish Architectural Press, 2019), 14.

2. Pernille Maria Bärnheim, Signe Sophie Bøggild, and Kristoffer Lindhardt Weiss, The Welfare City in Transition (Copenhagen: Danish Architectural Press, 2020), 6; Henrik Vejre, “Efterkrigstidens planlaegning og forvaltning af de grønne områder,” in Den Grønne Metropol: Natur- og Rekreative Områder i Hovedstadsmetropolen efter 1900, ed. Caspar Christensen et al. (Frederiksberg: Frydenlund Academic, 2016), 283.

3. Karin Lützen, Byen tæmmes: Kernefamilie, sociale reformer og velgørenhed i 1800-tallets København (Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag, 2013).

4. Ninna Javette Koefoed and Bo Kristian Holm, eds., Pligt og omsorg: velfærdsstatens lutherske rødder (Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 2021).

5. Deane Simpson, “Mellem ‘modereret’ neoliberalisme og velfærdpolitik: København under den ‘konkurrencedygtige’ og ‘attraktive’ bys paradigmer,” in Form til Velfærd, ed. Jannie Rosenberg Bendsen et al. (Copenhagen: Arkitektens Forlag), 146–171; Weiss, Critical City, 12.

6. Ellen Marie Braae et al., “Welfare Landscapes: Open Spaces of Danish Social Housing Estates Reconfigured,” in Mass Housing of the Scandinavian Welfare States: Exploring Histories and Design Strategies, eds. Miles Glendinning and Svava Riesto (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 2020), 13–23; Weiss, Critical City, 6.

7. Bärnheim, Bøggild, and Weiss, The Welfare City in Transition, 136.

8. Charles Bessard, “Liveability in the Age of the Risk City,” Charles Bessard in conversation with Kristoffer Lindhardt Weiss in Critical City: The Success and Failure of the Danish Welfare City, ed. Kristoffer Lindhardt Weiss (Copenhagen: Danish Architectural Press, 2019); Ole Fryd and Gertrud Jørgensen, Byerne og det stigende havvand: Statusrapport 2019 (Frederiksberg: University of Copenhagen, 2020).

9. See e.g.: Dragør Municipality, “Kystbeskyttelse i Dragør: Vinder udpeget,” https://www.dragoer.dk/vores-kommune/nyt-fra-dragoer-kommune/nyheder/kystbeskyttelse-i-dragoer-vinder-udpeget/ (accessed May 27, 2021); Vejle Municipality, “Vinder fundet til idékonkurrencen Kanten,” https://vejle.citizenlab.co/da-DK/projects/idekonkurrencen-kanten (accessed May 27, 2021).

10. IPCC, Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, eds. Valérie Masson-Delmotte et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); European Academies’ Science Advisory Council, Key Messages from European Science Academies for UNFCCC COP26 and CBD COP15 (Halle and Brussels: EASAC, 2021).

11. Niels Thougaard, “Køge Bugt Strandpark,” Landskab 61 (1980): 141–151; Erik Valgren, Per Ole Front, and Per Eilstrup, Køge Bugt Strandpark (Copenhagen: I/S Køge Bugt Strandpark, 1986).

12. Danish Ministry of the Interior and Housing, Tættere på: Grønne byer og en hovedstad i udvikling (Copenhagen: Danish Ministry of the Interior and Housing, 2021), 21.

13. James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York and London: Psychology Press, 1979).

14. Peter Cook, Drawing: The Motive Force of Architecture (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 111–134.

15. Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 3.

16. Ibid., 88.

17. Ibid., 90.

18. Ibid., 148.

19. John Collier Jr. and Malcolm Collier, Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1967), 5; Own experiences of the authors.

20. Collier and Collier, Visual Anthropology, 208.

21. See for example: Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey [1967],” in Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996), 68–74.

22. Jesper Fabricius, Delvist eksemplariske eksempler på fotografier af blandt andet huse og landskaber (Copenhagen: Fotografisk Center, 2007); Maria Finn, Careless Nature (Copenhagen: Space Poetry, 2020).

23. Lawrence Halprin, Cities (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1963); Alice Foxley and Vogt Landschaftsarchitekten, Distance & Engagement: Walking, Thinking and Making Landscape (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2010); Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 2001).

24. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 119.

25. Ibid., 120.

26. Ibid., 122.

27. Ibid., 122.

28. See for example: Jan Bengtsson, Per Angelstam, Thomas Elmqvist, Urban Emanuelsson, Carl Folke, Margareta Ihse, Fredrik Moberg, and Magnus Nyström, “Reserves, Resilience and Dynamic Landscapes 20 Years Later,” Ambio 50 (2021): 962; Matthew Gandy, “From Urban Ecology to Ecological Urbanism: An Ambiguous Trajectory,” Area 2015 47.2 (2015): 150; Forster Ndubisi, ed., The Ecological Design and Planning Reader (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014); Kate Orff, Towards an Urban Ecology (New York: Monacelli Press, 2016).

29. Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment (New York: George Braziller, 1969).

30. Anne Whiston Spirn, The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

31. IPCC, Climate Change 2021.

European Academies’ Science Advisory Council, Key Messages.

32. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 195.

33. Thougaard, “Køge Bugt Strandpark,” 61; Valgren, Front and Eilstrup, Køge Bugt Strandpark.

34. Olaf Forchhammer and Chr. Blixencrone-Møller, Københavnsegnens grønne Områder: Forslag til et System af Områder for Friluftsliv (Copenhagen: Dansk Byplanlaboratorium, 1936); Thougaard, “Køge Bugt Strandpark,” 61; Valgren, Front and Eilstrup, Køge Bugt Strandpark.

35. Thougaard, “Køge Bugt Strandpark,” 61; Valgren, Front and Eilstrup, Køge Bugt Strandpark.

36. Mette Tapdrup Mortensen, Ditte Maria Sørensen, and Poul Sverrild, Fritidsliv ved Køge Bugt (Frederiksberg: Frydenlund, 2017).

37. Forchhammer and Blixencrone-Møller, Københavnsegnens grønne Områder, 65–66.

38. Valgren, Front, and Eilstrup, Køge Bugt Strandpark.

39. Thougaard, “Køge Bugt Strandpark,” 61; Valgren, Front, and Eilstrup, Køge Bugt Strandpark.

40. Ornis Consult, Evaluering 1981–1989: naturovervågning ved hjælp af fugleoptaellinger (Valby: Hovedstadsrådet, 1989); Peter Vestergaard, “Natural Plant Diversity Development on a Man-Made Dune System,” in Restoration of Coastal Dunes, eds. M. Luisa Martínez, Juan B. Gallego-Fernández, and Patrick A. Hesp (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2013), 49–66.

41. Thougaard, “Køge Bugt Strandpark,” 61; Valgren, Front, and Eilstrup, Køge Bugt Strandpark.

42. Valgren, Front, and Eilstrup, Køge Bugt Strandpark.

43. Strandparken, “Friluftsaktiviteter.”

44. Danish Ministry of the Interior and Housing, Tættere på, 21.

45. Strandparken, “Friluftsaktiviteter.”

46. Danish Ministry of the Interior and Housing, Tættere på, 9, 19.

47. Malene Hauxner, Fantasiens have: Det moderne gennembrud i havekunsten og sporene i byens landskab (Copenhagen: Arkitektens Forlag, 1993), 22–26.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Copenhagen in Denmark as well as by the grant “Cities and Adaptation to Sea Level Rise – New Space for Solutions” by the philanthropic foundation Realdania.

Notes on contributors

Anna Aslaug Lund

Anna Aslaug Lund is an architect and landscape architect MAA PhD and assistant professor at the Section for Landscape Architecture and Planning, University of Copenhagen. Anna has extensive practice experience focusing on cities, landscapes, climate adaptation and sustainable urbanism from a planning perspective as well as from a project design and detailing perspective. Her research interests are particularly centred on the spatial implications and potentials of climate adaptation, the relations between ecologies of nature and the processes of urbanism, narratives of landscapes and cities and, finally, the bodily experienced space. Anna is currently working together with Gertrud Jørgensen and Ole Fryd on a Danish project on nature-based solutions to sea level rise.

Gertrud Jørgensen

Gertrud Jørgensen, M.Arch. PhD, is a professor in spatial planning at the Section for Landscape Architecture and Planning, University of Copenhagen. She works with a broad variety of planning issues, a.o. urban transformation, sustainable urban development and strategic planning in urban and rural settings, including responses to climate change. Her research interest lies in the relation between planning tools, processes and planning outcome in terms of spatial quality, sustainability and livable environments. Gertrud leads a Danish project on nature-based planning solutions to sea level rise.

Ole Fryd

Ole Fryd, MSc Urban Design, PhD, is an associate professor of landscape architecture and urban planning in the Section for Landscape Architecture and Planning, University of Copenhagen. He has fifteen years of experience as a researcher on urban green infrastructure as a climate change adaptation measure in the Global North and the Global South. His research focuses on urban water systems, coastal dynamics and social-ecological-technological systems with a view to nature-based solutions and environmental ethics.