Swim in the harbor, drink water straight from the tap, heat your building with district heatring and bring your bike onto the subway. This is all part of everyday life for the residents of Copenhagen and it serves as inspiration for cities worldwide. Overseas guests often wonder and ask: how is it possible? The catalogue “Copenhagen Solutions for Sustainable Cities” provides the answer.
Politicians, journalists and urban planners from New York to Beijing, are being inspired by Copenhagen’s sustainability credentials for energy, environment and traffic.
To meet this interest, the City of Copenhagen in conjunction with Ramboll has updated “Copenhagen Solutions for Sustainable Cities”, a catalogue of 12 examples of sustainable solutions in the Danish capital. These range from inner city harbour bathing areas to clean drinking water, and bike lanes filled with cyclists.
Visualising sustainability
“When we show overseas guests around Copenhagen, their reactions are often, “Impressive, but how do you do it?” or, “We´ll never be able to have clean water in our harbour, to agree on an integrated heating system with 20 other municipalities or get people onto their bikes,” said Søren Hansen, Project Director for Ramboll. He added, “Many of our customers want to work sustainably, but it is a barrier when they don’t have a basic understanding of what this means.”
With this in mind, the objective of the catalogue was to create a simple explanation of each solution with ‘infographics’ instead of text-heavy explanations. The infographics provide a way of visualising data and giving the reader a basic understanding of what it means to work on sustainable urban development.
For each solution, the sustainable benefits are highlighted, so the reader can easily see the associated economic, social and environmental value and what it takes to develop and implement such a solution in their own city.
Innovative process gives a better end product
The catalogue has been produced through a co-creation process, whereby partners from various departments in the City of Copenhagen, Copenhagen Cleantech Cluster, State of Green and consultants from Ramboll have worked together and shared knowledge. Co-creation is a development method that uses the involved stakeholders´ knowledge and experience to conceive an end product that is both innovative and qualified by the end users.
Read more and view the catalogue here
Source: Ramboll