It’s not often that the worlds of town planning and traffic management become mired in controversy, but in recent years the innocuous concept of the “15-minute city” has sparked outrage in online forums, among cynical politicians and on the streets of British cities such as Oxford. The originator of the concept, urban planner Carlos Moreno, has even received death threats. All of this has hinged on the spurious conspiracy theory that 15-minute cities were part of some shady global population-control agenda, rather than a desire to simply create more pleasant neighbourhoods.
If the concept of having all your basic amenities within 15 minutes’ distance was enough to provoke such hostility, what would the conspiracy theorists make of a five-minute city? Fortunately, they have failed to notice that Denmark has already built such a place: Nordhavn, an emerging new neighbourhood of Copenhagen. If they visited today they might be disappointed, or perhaps converted.
You could possibly see Nordhavn as some sort of new-world-order dystopia, where people are only pretending to be happy because they are being brainwashed by the 5G towers, or something. But a more likely explanation is that this is what city-making looks like when you get everything right: human-scaled, pedestrian-friendly, architecturally diverse, environmentally standard-setting, lots of waterfront. A place people are happy to hang around, even on a chilly winter’s day: shopping, cycling, walking their dogs, jogging, even cold-water swimming at the public beach. It does feel pretty quiet here, but that’s not because there are no people; it’s because there are hardly any cars – and those that do glide by are electric.
This is the real underpinning of the five-minute city concept. “Cars are not welcome here,” says Lars Riemann of the planning consultants Ramboll, which won the competition to design Nordhavn in 2008, along with the architects Cobe and Sleth and other partners. Nordhavn was a former industrial landscape: a 2 sq km peninsula to the north-east of the city centre that operated as a freeport for more than a century. But with Copenhagen’s population and popularity on the rise, the city decided to redevelop these docklands, providing homes for 40,000 people and workplaces for another 40,000 over the next 40 years. Today, Nordhavn’s population is about 6,000.
“If you go back in time, when you did city planning, you would say: ‘Where do the roads go? How do the cars get from A to B?’ That was your main priority,” says Riemann. “Then we’d put bike lanes next to the roads, pedestrian areas next to that and so on. Here, we did the opposite. We said: ‘What does a walkable city look like? What do the streets look like? What do people like to experience as they are walking?’” Transport-wise, they started with a new metro line, then cycle routes. “At the end, it was like: ‘OK, so now that we have all this infrastructure for walking, biking and public transit, is there still some room for cars?’”
The “five-minute” tag (which was coined long before 15-minute cities became popular) stemmed from this. Around each of the metro stations, the planners drew circles of 400 metres radius. “That’s what you can walk in five minutes,” says Cobe’s project director, Rune Boserup, from his office – a converted warehouse in Nordhavn, as it happens. (Architects love it round here: the Danish superstar Bjarke Ingels has also built his new headquarters just up the quay.) “Within a circle like that, you would have a mix of residential areas and office buildings, social infrastructure such as schools and kindergartens, retail, cafes – everything that you would need in your daily life.”
There are huge environmental benefits to this shift away from cars, of course, and Denmark has been leading the way on this for decades. After hosting the Cop15 climate summit in 2009, Copenhagen pledged to become “the world’s first carbon-neutral city” – originally by 2025, though the target has drifted by a few years since (blame overoptimistic carbon capture accounting and other causes). Still, the city has put in green initiatives such as centralised district heating, renewable power sources and energy efficiency programmes, and it has reduced emissions by 75% since 2005. Nordhavn is carbon-neutral, though. On top of the transport, new buildings are designed to the highest environmental standards, and some were adapted from old buildings, such as the striking 17-storey Silo and the cylindrical Portland Towers, originally silos used to store grain and cement respectively.
It’s not just about environmental sustainability, though. “It’s also about social sustainability,” says Anne Skovbro, the managing director of By & Havn, the government-owned city and port authority, which owns and manages Nordhavn. “As humans, we are nourished by the idea of having contact with other people,” she says as she takes me on a tour of the neighbourhood. “In Denmark, you need to go to have some danish pastry in the morning. That’s important. And it’s nice to meet your neighbour – that is part of the design here.”
A more social neighbourhood is also a safer one, she adds. Like almost everyone I talk to, she is bemused by the idea of conspiracy theories about 15-minute cities: “Oh God! I haven’t heard about that.”
Crossing cycle lanes as wide as most roads for vehicles, Skovbro shows me how Århusgade, Nordhavn’s main street, connects to the rest of the city in one direction, and in the other leads into pedestrian alleyways, little parks and courtyards. The shops are decidedly upmarket: design studios, small boutiques, bike shops, plus bakeries, cafes, restaurants – with four- or five-storey apartment blocks above. There are also Lidl and Netto supermarkets further down, but chains such as Starbucks, McDonald’s or Zara are absent. This is no accident, says Skovbro. “When we sold the plots, we bought all the ground floors back, so we could design and decide what kind of shops we would like to have there in order to create this vibrant urban environment.”
Concentrating on the commercial mix turns out to be a critical part of the formula, says Peter Bur Andersen of the design firm Briq, which helped with Nordhavn’s urban strategy. When it comes to new cities, the government often puts in transport, culture, parks and playgrounds, then just leaves the rest to market forces, he says, “and therefore, we often see that these new city districts are born without a soul”. Here, by contrast, they “curated” the mix of retail. “We shortlisted who would be the best fit in Copenhagen for each of the spaces and we invited them … and then these people who came in, they bought into the narrative of co-creating this community.” For the bike shop, for example, they went to Pas Normal Studios, a hip (and expensive) local brand that didn’t have a physical outlet. Its shop has now become a magnet for the city’s Lycra brigade, but also runs a cafe and a community cycling club.
Living up to the five-minute localism means packing in a mix of uses, Skovbro says. Hardly any of the buildings serve just one function. She takes me into Audo House, a converted merchant’s house from 1918. It is now a design showroom and “concept shop”, with a restaurant and cafe downstairs and a boutique hotel upstairs. Going even further is the local landmark Konditaget Lüders. On its ground floor is the Lidl supermarket, plus the most well-organised recycling centre you’ve ever seen, with a free shop of unwanted goods at its centre. Above is a multistorey car park. And on the rooftop is a colourful children’s play and workout area. At all hours, joggers can be found running up and down the building’s external staircases. There is even a built-in stopwatch, so you can time your ascent.
I meet Charlotte Korsager Winther, a personal trainer, and her friend Hanne Garder, who works in human resources, lifting weights on the rooftop of Konditaget Lüders. They both live a few hundred metres away – well within five minutes. They met through the local sports club, having moved here about six years ago from the suburbs of Copenhagen. “We had a good community where I came from, but that was … well, it was in a boring area,” says Garder.
“This is not boring. Things happen here,” says Winther. “And people mean well. We have teenagers and we wanted to move back to the city and were attracted by the community feeling.
“You’ve got water on three sides, so people come here either because they live here or for a purpose. They don’t drive through, as they do in other areas of Copenhagen. So you feel tied to it, and you have a certain type of responsibility if you live here – you don’t just bump into people and rush off. There’s eye contact here.”
Besides the sports, there’s plenty to do, they say: book clubs, knitting clubs, pot-luck dinners, “the Friday afternoon drinks club”. Many of the local people I speak to are proud to the point of boastful about how happy they are living here. Rune, an older resident, loves his modern apartment and sea views. He would like some more green space to walk his dog, “but it’s nice to have everything I need nearby – the shops, the metro, the cinema”.
“In summertime, it is the most popular place in Copenhagen,” enthuses Klara, a student, who is sitting and chatting with a friend by the waterfront. In winter, it is a bit quiet, she says, but the city centre is just a few stops up the metro. The popularity of the public swimming areas on summer nights has led to tensions with residents, I’m told, to the extent that Nordhavn now employs stewards to police the noise levels.
I find a more novel form of community at Nordhus – a brand-new multipurpose social space run by a non-profit foundation. It holds daily communal lunches and dinners, where anyone can come in and eat at shared long tables (for 125 Danish kroner – about £14). It also holds events, workshops and concerts, and rents rooms to artists and guests. On the evening I wander in, about 50 people are taking part in a bingo night, with prizes from local stores. “Nordhavn is still a bit of a cultural desert in some ways,” says the general manager, Maj Scott-Kofod. “It has lots of restaurants and bars and shops, but it doesn’t have an open place for people to just come and be together.”
Nordhus’s founders, Rasmus and Felicia Nørgaard, are sustainable property developers who took it upon themselves to create something that would give people a sense of belonging. The events and the cooking are organised by about 30 “culture creators” – people aged 18 to 25, from all over Denmark, who live upstairs for a subsidised rent.
If there is a drawback to the five-minute, or even the 15-minute, city concept, it’s that it can lead to the creation of exclusive enclaves. Everything is very nice for the people who live in Nordhavn, but as the upmarket design stores suggest, it is not cheap. In fact, it has become one of the most expensive places in the city: property prices are 20% higher than the Copenhagen average. The area has become especially popular with expatriate families – a smart new fee-paying international school, clad in blue-green solar panels, opened in 2017. There are plans to build a large state-funded school next to it with shared sports fields in between, but for now, secondary school kids have to commute outside Nordhavn.
It’s not quite what the conspiracy theorists warned about, but is the five-minute city creating almost a gated community? “There is a danger of that,” Skovbro acknowledges. “But that’s why social housing is an important part of it.” Social housing rents are usually 60% to 70% of private rented accommodation, and fixed, she explains, so key workers will not get priced out. Copenhagen has a city-wide policy of 30% social housing; Nordhavn has less than 20%, but the proportion is expected to improve.
Another fly in the ointment is transport – the backbone of the entire Nordhavn scheme. The original plan mapped out seven metro stations along a line looping around the peninsula, but that has been scaled back to just four, of which two have so far opened. That means fewer of those 400m radii, on which the five-minute concept rests, although Nordhavn’s stations are still closer together than elsewhere in the city, Boserup points out.
At present, Nordhavn is only about 25% complete. The bulk of the site is still industrial, including a container port and warehouses. But there are enticing new features on the near horizon. One is a large public park along the northern coast of the peninsula, which is slated to open in two or three years. Another is the Tunnel Factory – a huge former complex in the middle of Nordhavn, once used to manufacture sections of the underwater tunnel connecting Copenhagen to Malmö. It is now being transformed into a “cultural hotspot with an international outlook” – something along the lines of London’s Tate Modern, perhaps, although the space is so enormous, nobody seems to have figured out what to do with it.
Despite the attention-grabbing ideas, nobody at Nordhavn is overstating its claims to be a brand-new idea. “The basics of it is very traditional European urban design,” says Skovbro. When it comes down to it, parts of many existing European cities could also be classified as “five-minute”, she says. In other words, the city of the future increasingly resembles the city of the past – which is to say, the past before motorcars and monolithic modernism took over. Except now we can have clean transport, safe streets and cosy, triple-glazed apartments, but people still make eye contact with their neighbours.
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• This article was amended on 11 December 2024. An earlier version confused the professions of Charlotte Korsager Winther and Hanne Garder, whose name was spelled incorrectly. It also misattributed a quote by Winther (“You’ve got water on three sides […]”) to Garder.
