Street Fights in Copenhagen: Bicycle and Car Politics in a Green Mobility City

In contemporary urban planning, Copenhagen, Denmark, looms large as a model for how cities can undo the environmental, economic, and social damage wrought by the automobile era and restore streets to the center of public life through investments in mass transit, pedestrian, and particularly bicycle infrastructure. In Street Fights in Copenhagen, Jason Henderson and Natalie Marie Gulsrud provide a detailed analysis of how Copenhagen achieved its enviable status as the world’s “best-practice city” for bicycling. They rigorously assess the current political moment in Copenhagen, which is locked in a “mobility stalemate” as car-oriented planning makes inroads into reversing the city’s widely admired sustainable mobility regime. Most important, they emphasize that Copenhagen’s green urbanism—and the threats it faces—is not sui generis, exceptional, or merely technical, but eminently political, and that it holds broad lessons not just for infrastructure design but urban political imagination as well.

Henderson and Gulsrud begin with the numbers. In Copenhagen, 29 percent of all trips, 32 percent of shopping trips, and a staggering 62 percent of weekday journeys to work or school within the city limits are made by bicycle, figures rivaled only by the Dutch cities of Amsterdam and Utrecht (Portland, the U.S. bicycle capital, counts just over 6 percent of workers commuting by bike). Car ownership within the city proper is concomitantly low, at just 200 cars per 1,000 people, well below Denmark’s already low average of 438, and just 33 percent of trips are made by car. Combining cycling and public transit is common for longer journeys, and 25 percent of families use a cargo bicycle for ferrying children. The city has plans to improve on these already stunning numbers. Its 2025 Bicycle Strategy seeks to increase the bicycle mode share of trips crossing the city’s boundary from 41 percent to 50 percent, and its 2025 Climate Plan has a target of reducing car trips to 25 percent. To absorb the estimated 60,000 additional daily cyclists, the city has begun upgrading the bicycle network to its new “Plus Net” standard: separated cycle lanes three meters wide.

Henderson and Gulsrud outline the three interdependent factors that underlie these rates of cycling. The first is the legacy of Danish social democracy. In 1910, a high tax rate was applied to the purchase of an automobile, which was considered a luxury, and because Denmark never developed an auto industry, this tax remained as high as 180 percent of the car’s cost for most of the twentieth century. The second factor is the city’s relatively high population density, which was preserved by the city’s 1947 Finger Plan aligning mass transit and land use along radials emanating from the city center, despite the rise of more car-oriented planning in the postwar era. Third is the city’s extensive network of separated cycling facilities, bicycle-specific traffic signals, and “cycle superhighways,” begun under conditions of relative roadway overcapacity during the stagnation and decline of the 1970s and 1980s. Following their victory in a pivotal city election in 2005, the Social Democrats intensified their bicycle-oriented urban development strategy, expanding bicycle infrastructure investment as part of Copenhagen’s global brand and presiding over the soaring cycling rates seen today.

Whereas many narratives of northern European cycling cities focus on the technical achievements of their bicycle infrastructure, Henderson and Gulsrud stress that the seeming consensus regarding mobility hides ferocious struggles. Economic growth, brownfield redevelopment, and the fiscal pressure to lure elites back to the city center have meant finding a way to accommodate their cars as well, straining the current political settlement. Analytically, Street Fights in Copenhagen centers on a set of political ideologies in relation to mobility that Henderson (2013) outlined in Street Fight, which examined mobility politics in San Francisco: left/progressive, right/conservative, and neoliberal. Left/progressive mobility politics, with which the authors are most aligned, seek to reclaim road space from automobiles in the interest of reducing carbon emissions, promoting social and economic equity, and—in their most trenchant form—challenging the political economy of urban capitalism. Right/conservative mobility politics, conversely, frame individual mobility as the basis of freedom and oppose efforts to expand cycling space at the expense of cars. Neoliberal mobility politics favor market-based interventions, and thus the creation of markets where they do not currently exist, but oppose the regulation of existing markets, leading to shifting alliances with both left/progressives and right/conservatives, depending on context. By dissecting a series of political battles ranging from congestion pricing to reducing parking to megaprojects like the Metro City Ring and a proposed harbor tunnel, Henderson and Gulsrud show how the balance of forces between these political blocs is changing and how automobility is slowly but steadily undermining the achievements of bicycle and transit planning.

Street Fights in Copenhagen is at its strongest when analyzing these political conjunctures in intricate detail and focusing on debates between different political blocs whose interests are unevenly represented in the party system. At times, however, these contests float above social reality; although Henderson and Gulsrud do a good job of outlining the general geography of class, occupation, and mobility in the Copenhagen region, the outcomes that they observe are portrayed at times as resulting from the clash of ideological positions rather than material conditions. The increasingly neoliberal framework within which mobility politics unfold in Copenhagen, particularly the emphasis on market-based solutions and the enrolling of cyclists in the “creative city” discourse of urban development, is the result of how neoliberalization has changed the material conditions underlying the debates described, rather than just the neoliberal ideas of the political actors involved.

For example, over the 1990s and 2000s, center-right national governments were able to undermine regional planning standards by devolving them to municipalities. The dependence of these municipalities on local tax revenues thus promotes fiscal competition, and the raising of new taxes requires national enabling legislation. Thus, the left–liberal coalition that won power in the mid-2000s kicked off the cycling renaissance by dramatically expanding its infrastructural base, at the same time adopting neoliberal narratives of urban competitiveness and pursuing tax increment financed brownfield regeneration schemes to attract wealthier buyers who wind up bringing more cars into the city. Is this the convergence of progressive and neoliberal thinking, or the consequences of working within a neoliberal structure that deeply constrains what is possible? Because they are rightly concerned with showing the fungibility of mobility regimes—and thus hope for car-centric places like the United States—Henderson and Gulsrud are keen to emphasize the agentic aspects of mobility politics, but these structural elements are undertheorized.

Some readers might also ask whether cycling is as essential to urban climate policy as the authors argue, because Copenhagen is such an outlier among peer cities. Henderson and Gulsrud make a very convincing case that cycling has been key to Copenhagen’s impressive achievements in decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions. As they make clear, though, the function of bicycle infrastructure is only in part about moving people; equally important, it prevents the allocation of street space back to cars. Hence, the authors note with concern that the incipient opening of the Metro could carve off cyclists, reduce pressure to expand bicycle infrastructure, and create a political opening for automobile advocates to take back road space. Thus, paradoxically, the excessive efficiency of better mass transit—freeing up too much road space—might threaten car restraint, which, following the failure of congestion pricing, depends on cycling infrastructure to occupy road space and crowd out car users.

The danger is particularly acute in the context of the rise of right-wing populism in Denmark (as elsewhere), which has squeezed the progressive left between an increasingly neoliberal city and increasingly right-populist suburbs and small towns. Henderson and Gulsrud note that the right-wing Danish People’s Party is staunchly pro-car, but even more staunchly anti-Copenhagen, which leads it to oppose car-oriented megaprojects on the grounds that investment should be more widely distributed across the country, a stance akin to that of the gilets jaunes in France. Left undiscussed, however, is the fact that the People’s Party also has an aggressive anti-immigrant agenda, and under its influence Danish politics around race have taken a sharp rightward turn. Although it is not the objective of the book, it would have been useful for Street Fights in Copenhagen to explore how this rise in open racism affects their schema of mobility politics, and whether the far right’s construction of cities like Copenhagen as pro-immigrant left enclaves is fueling more openly revanchist national politics, with grim implications for mobility.

Street Fights in Copenhagen is a detailed and enormously useful analysis of a place with a mythology that obscures our understanding of its comparative value, and it will be of substantial interest to scholars of urban geography, transportation and land use planning, public policy, and critical mobility studies. It is also a full-throated rallying cry for a more redistributive politics of sustainable urban mobility, and the crucial role of cycling as part of such an agenda.

British Academy;

John G. Stehlin
Department of Geography, Environment, and Sustainability, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC.
[email protected]