Form Follows People? – Copenhagen’s Ny Nørreport as a Post-Participatory Project

Abstract

Following the dictum: “Form Follows People” two Danish offices used patterns generated from pedestrian movement to create the infrastructural layout when redesigning Copenhagen’s Nørreport train station. A choice that was praised by a unanimous jury and municipal client who were eager to present the winning proposal as being shaped by “the people.” However other readings are possible, the design can also be seen as a striking architectural gesture where the public is both framed as a vital prerequisite yet at the same time as the unaware producers of space. In order to understand this reasoning, this essay looks at the “human oriented approach” the offices adopted for the Nørreport project. This entails discussing the project as somewhat participatory and tracing its references back to the research on pedestrian movement done by Danish architect and urbanist Jan Gehl in the 1960s. An approach that now 50 years later can be seen coinciding with a shift in city planning where municipalities and planning offices readily embrace designing for more loosely defined subjects such as pedestrians or simply “people.” As the argument for the design only formally maintains the social agenda of participation, this essay asks whether the project could instead be read in terms of system design and its participatory practice understood in a cybernetic sense as feedback and input, and as such, if the project ultimately could be perceived as a “post-participatory” project.

Keywords:

• participation
• cybernetics
• COBE
• Copenhagen
• Jan Gehl
• urban living rooms

Notes

1. “Much more than a station” (Meget mere end en station) was the slogan for the competition. See: Nørreport: Meget mere end en station: Dommerbetaenkning, november (Copenhagen: 2019), 1.

2. Nørreport: Meget mere end en station: Dommerbetaenkning, 3.

3. Ibid., 10

4. “Ny Nørreport er et sandt mekka for at kigge på mennesker,” Karsten Ifversen, Politiken, (Copenhagen: 2015), 1.

5. Landezine’s Public Choice Award 2017

6. 2017 Public Choice Award for Projects: Nørreport Station: landezine-award.com/norreport-station-copenhagen/

7. Maroš Krivý and Tahl Kaminer, “Introduction: The Participatory Turn in Urbanism,” Footprint Journal 7, no. 2 (2013), 1–5.

8. Free Art Collective, “Impossible Participation,” in Interactive Contemporary Art – Participation in Practice, ed. Kathryn Brown (Delft: Free Art Collective, 2016), 255.

9. Tony Cassidy, Environmental Psychology: Behaviour and Experience in Context (London: Psychology Press, 1997), 7.

10. Cassidy, Environmental Psychology: Behaviour and Experience in Context, 10.

11. Ryan Love, “Aporia of Participatory Planning: Framing Local Action in the Entrepreneurial City,” Footprint 7, no. 2 (2013), 7–20. 

12. Johann Albrecht, “Towards a Theory of Participation in Architecture – An Examination of Humanistic Planning theories,” Journal of Architectural Education 42, no. 1 (1988), 24.

13. Ibid., 24.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., 25.

16. Ibid., 24.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid., 25.

19. Sherry Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” Journal of the American Planning Association 85, no. 1 (1966), 26.

20. “The typology, which is designed to be provocative, is arranged in a ladder pattern (…)” Sherry Arnstein in the abstract for “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” Journal of the American Planning Association 85, no. 1, (1966), 24.

21. Paul Davidoff, “Advocay and Pluralism in Planning,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners (1965), 331.

22. Albrecht, “Towards a Theory,” 24.

23. Markus Miessen: https://studiomiessen.com/markus-miessen/

24. Markus Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010), 42.

25. COBE Architects and Julie Cirelli, ed, Our Urban Living Room – Learning from Copenhagen (Stockholm: Arvinius + Orfeus Publishing, 2016), 126.

26. In 2013, Copenhagen was the number one city in Monocle’s annual Quality of Life Survey: https://monocle.com/film/affairs/most-liveable-city-copenhagen/

27. COBE and Cirelli, Our Urban Living Room, 126.

28. Ibid.

29. Jens Kvorning, “Vadested ved voldene – Porten til København,” Arkitekten, no. 4 (2016), 54.

30. Deane Simpson, “Between ‘circumscribed’ Neoliberalism and Welfarism: Copenhagen under the Metric Regimes of the ‘Competitive’ and ‘Attractive’ City,” in Forming Welfare, eds. Jannie Rosenberg Bendsen, Mette Jerl Jensen, Katrine Lotz, Kirsten Marie Raahauge, Deane Simpson and Kjeld Vindum (Copenhagen: Arkitektens Forlag, 2017), 147.

31. Holger Bisgaard “København er genrejst – men hvad nu?,” Politiken, 2010, 1.

32. “Camilla van Deurs bliver ny stadsarkitekt i København” Politiken, 2019, 1.

33. Nørreport: Meget mere end en station: Dommerbetaenkning, 10.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid.

36. “Byen er der hvor alle har lov til at komme,” quote from Jan Gehl, Ingrid Gehl “Mennesker i byer,” Arkitekten, vol. 16, (1966), 443.

37. COBE and Cirelli, Our Urban Living Room, 124.

38. “At Nørreport ‘people flow through the station’ and ‘out into the city’”: COBE and Cirelli, Our Urban Living Room, 125.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid.

41. 3:50 ‘Our Urban Living Room’—Jan Gehl and Dan Stubbegaard, Danish Architecture Centre, January 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2JKcN28MaY

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid, 00:07:00

44. Jan & Ingrid Gehl, “Torve og pladser,” Arkitekten, vol. 20 no. 16 (1966), 317.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid., 317–319.

47. Thomas Krarup, interview by author, Copenhagen, September 24, 2021.

48. Douglas Spencer, The Architecture of Neoliberalism – How Contemporary Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 48.

49. Pier Vittorio Aureli, “Introduction,” Ladders, Albert Pope (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2014), 1.

50. Ibid.

51. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (London: Free Association Books, 1950), 15–18.

52. Gordon Pask, “The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics,” Architectural Design, (1969), 68.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nina Stener Jørgensen

Nina Stener Jørgensen is a PhD student at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Faculty of Architecture, where she graduated from in 2018 with a MSc. Engineering in Urban Studies. Studying architectural models of participation from the 1960s in light of today’s so-called smart city, her PhD research focuses on producing a genealogy of what could be referred to as a post-participatory condition in architecture.