How does Copenhagen perform as a data-driven compact city?
A more compact city means a more liveable city, with greater inclusivity, sustainability and resilience. But what exactly is a compact city? And how do we evidence it with data?
In this article, Computational Cities Consultant Abdelrahman Helal and Data Expert Martin Henriksen explore Copenhagen’s performance as a compact city. They also discuss the benefits the compact city model has on our urban infrastructure and quality of life.
What is a compact city?
In simple terms, a compact city means you have easy access to everything you need in close proximity. A compact city provides residents with a high quality of life within their urban environment. Amenities relating to both work, leisure, education, healthcare, social value and public services need to be easily accessible.
This city model has survived many epochs, yet it is still immensely important for factors relating to inclusion and sustainability. From the dense, mixed-use city centres of medieval Europe, to the plea of Jane Jacobs for diversity in cities, and The Paris Agreement’s ‘15-minute city’; the compact city is a tried and tested model. The benefits of a more compact city fall into four categories:
- Transport and mobility: Encourage active means of transportation (i.e., walking, and cycling), to reduce the dependency on cars and other motorised means of transportation. This will also reduce carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles.
- Health and resilience: During the Covid-19 pandemic, we noticed how important it was to have amenities and services nearby as it makes a city more attractive to residents. Evidence shows that making a city more compact1 can lead to considerable reductions (between 13% and 19% in cardiovascular disease alone) in the burden of disease. This can be achieved by residents simply walking more often.
- Inclusion and sense of community: Reducing the dependency on cars and other transportation vehicles can result in great inclusivity for vulnerable groups who are typically disadvantaged in urban environments (e.g., the elderly or those with disabilities). It also encourages interaction and community building within neighbourhoods.
- Spatial efficiency: More efficient use of space within urban infrastructure will reduce the energy use in buildings.
How do you measure a compact city?
There are many elements to a compact city. Writer, urbanist and activist Jane Jacobs was one of the pioneers behind defining compact city parameters. These include urban density, length of blocks and ground-floor usage. Many of these parameters have been incorporated into sustainability rating systems such as DGNB (German Sustainable Building Council) and LEED (US Green Building Council) for cities.
A key parameter to evaluate the performance of a location or a district within a city is the level of accessibility to social and commercial amenities. DGNB is one of the leading organisations for sustainability rating systems across Europe, including Denmark. In DGNB’s evaluation criteria for districts schemes, there are clear definitions for the accessibility of social and commercial amenities.
The accessibility is measured by the linear distance or travel-time via public transport or walking to the amenity. The amenity has a specific point score assigned based on the category type. For example, if a particular location has a supermarket within 700 metres and a university within 1300 metres, that location would have a score of 20. This would be a score at the lower end of the scale. A good score is 50 and above.
While the intention of the DGNB is to measure specific functions that are within easy reach, we are embracing this approach (using the urban districts parameters) to analyse the whole city and its surrounding neighbourhoods. Analysing the performance of a city using this rating system requires information about the type and location of every single amenity in the city. This requires a large collection of data. Fortunately, the availability of open data is getting better.
OpenStreetMap data provides a lot of insight into points of interest and different uses within cities. Cities are also making data increasingly available to the public. However, custom analysis tools are needed to process large amounts of data and to unlock the value of this data to help make more informed decisions about urban development. Using this data-driven approach in assessing compact cities has many benefits. These include:
- Informed and evidence-based data collection
- Quick and efficient insights
- Scalable from a single block to a district, a whole city, a whole country or beyond
- Adaptable to any location (depending on the available data)
- Visual, easy to understandable and transparent.
Buro Happold has developed a tool to collect, analyse and visualise geographic data for compact city assessment. It can be used to evaluate the accessibility to social and commercial amenities using the DGNB system, as well as helping help decisionmakers answer questions.
For instance, where should new residential projects be developed? Which urban areas needs improved infrastructure and/or greater social value? Is my project making a positive contribution to the sustainability of the local area? Our tool mostly uses the data made available from OpenStreetMap.
However, where the crowd-sourced datasets from OpenStreetMap is lacking, additional data sources are needed. Fortunately, Denmark, and the City of Copenhagen in particular, have made a lot of quality geographical data publicly available. It is curated through sites such as opendata.dk, geodata-info.dk and datafordeler.dk.
Is Copenhagen a compact city?
Copenhagen has set a goal to be carbon neutral by 2025. If they achieve this goal, they will be the first capital in the world to be net zero. Adopting compact city principles, particularly measures that minimises the city’s ecological and carbon footprint, achieving this goal will be a great challenge.
Overall, Copenhagen performs very well within the compact city analysis model.. Looking at the service coverage, the worst performing category is ‘Medical Services 2’ (see above graphic) with only 51% coverage. However, when considering the location of residential buildings, it is clear that the worst performing areas are where there is little to no residential buildings i.e., areas where no one is missing these services.
It is no surprise that districts towards the city centre perform better than districts on the periphery. For example, Nørrebro and Frederiksberg have well over 90% coverage in all categories, whereas periphery districts such as Brønshøj-Husum, Vanløse and Amager do not have the same level of coverage. Some of the categories have almost zero coverage.
Østerbro is an interesting area of Copenhagen as there is a large area still under development in the north-east; Nordhavnen. Discounting Nordhavnen from the district, Østerbro is well covered in most categories. Nonetheless, there is a lack of services within the categories of education, leisure and playgrounds, all within the northern part of the district.
Therefore, when development takes place in the Nordhavnen, areas, it is important to ensure that the right amenities are built within the residential area. Currently, this refers to education and medical facilities. Future development needs to incorporate sufficient space for day-care, kindergarten and GP surgeries.
Below are the statistics for all the districts within Copenhagen. Looking at the averages can be misleading if the data is not compared to the map showing where there is a need for services. Much of this depends on the number of people, their individual needs and their living standards.
Nørrebro
Østerbro
Other districts in Copenhagen
Why is this data useful and how can we utilise it?
This article focuses on the City of Copenhagen as a case study. It only attempts to answer the simple questions: Can Copenhagen be considered a compact city? And are there any areas where specific services/amenities are missing?
However, behind this exploration lies a more general exercise in creating a data-driven analysis process that gives insight into a city’s social infrastructure using an established rating framework. Not only is this analysis process data-driven, but it is also a highly modular process. It is very adaptable in terms of scale, location and consumable data.
The most important thing in compact city analysis is the availability and quality of the data. More than 80% of the data used in this analysis is from OpenStreetMap’s, which is available for locations around the world. This data is crowd-sourced and quality assured (e.g., a feature may not have the correct tag assigned).
Fortunately, in this process, the data quality can be easily upgraded by adding additional high quality data sources, which are readily available for cities in Denmark such as Copenhagen. The additional data includes day-care institutions, playgrounds and sports hall facilities.
Having established an adaptable, data-driven process for compact city analysis, it is possible to provide insights on urban development anywhere where there is sufficient, quality data. These insights can include where to locate new residential buildings, how well the building performs in terms of accessibility to social infrastructure, identifying potential gaps in social infrastructure to inform the location of new services/amenities, and the ability to assess the quality of a neighbourhood before investing in real estate.
Fundamentally, this is tool helps developers, policy makers and city residents to better understand the city as well as engage in evidence-based decision-making for more liveable and sustainable urban development.
NB: In order to understand the full analysis requires a lot more illustrations with more granular detail than we can provide in this article.
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