Knowledge on the Nordics
Knowledge on the Nordics
NNL Pod 4: How are city planning and sustainability connected?
Listen to how cities have developed historically and about different urban approaches to sustainability and inclusivity.
In this episode, students from Helsinki and Södertörn Universities, Gaëtan Gamba and Jasmin Adolph speak to two Romina Rodela from Södertörn University, and Natalie Gulsrud from the University of Copenhagen. This podcast was made possible by funding from the A.P. Moller Foundation.
Go to The New Nordic Lexicon for further reading on this and many more subjects!
Sound credits: Summer by tictac9 from freesound.org.
Hi everyone and welcome to this podcast for The New Nordic Lexicon. We are currently at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden, with other students and researchers from the universities of Aarhus, Helsinki, Copenhagen, and Södertörn.
Nicola Witcombe:This is a New Nordic Lexicon podcast on the connections between city planning and sustainability. The New Nordic Lexicon is a collection of articles, podcasts and films based on research about the Nordic region and the world.
Jasmin Adolph:My name is Jasmin, and I am an alumni of Södertörn here in Stockholm. And I just finished my master's degree last summer in international journalism.
Gaëtan Gamba:Along with Jasmin, I'm Gaëtan and I'm originally from Switzerland. I'm studying European and Nordic studies as a master degree level at the University of Helsinki.
Jasmin Adolph:We have two researchers who traveled all the way here and who will be helping us with this episode. Natalie, let's start with you. You're an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen. And you have written about environmental justice, urban planning processes and sustainability. Could you please start by telling us why city planning is important?
Natalie Marie Gulsrud:Well, more and more people live in cities now. And in a global context. And also in a European context, what we talked about as cities not only as sites of challenges, could be environmental challenges, socio economic challenges. Corona, right, viral challenges, but also a sites of solutions. So in that regard, cities are really interesting places to look at for innovation, for issues of democracy, for questions around involvement, and also inclusive processes, and just approaches to climate resilience and the nexus of not only climate adaptation, but also biodiversity, socio economic inclusion, and many other aspects. If we think about this kind of multi fold of issues that can be dealt with at one time.
Jasmin Adolph:How would you say have cities changed because there are always new events happening like a Corona like a pandemic. I
Natalie Marie Gulsrud:I mean, if we take the 20th century as an example, and move into the 21st, what we can say is, there was something called the Garden City movement that happened around the beginning of the 20th century, whereby cities were seen as places that could become more livable in terms of greening, right, and by thinking about trees as sort of the lungs of the cities. And this is something that heralds back to the Victorian era, where cities were cities were thought of as very dirty. It's kind of the tail end of the Industrial Revolution. And trees were seen as this process of kind of lifting cities, not only in terms of cleaning air, but also providing sort of moral salvation, and also democratizing spaces for people of different classes and backgrounds. And if we move them into a post World War era, we see sort of a retreat from cities. Right, we see the suburbanization and expansion of the automobile city, meaning that many people chose to live outside of the core of the city. There were a lot of industrial processes that occurred in the city. And there were students, poor people, a lot of working class that lived in the city, we see that trend reversing in the 80s and 90s, whereby jobs are taken to other places on a global scale, right. So moved offshore, you could say in cities, transitioning from being sort of industrial job centers to then being something else, whether you want to call it post industrial or taking on new identities. And here the role of urban green infrastructure becomes relevant again. Because what do we do then with that land that has been abandoned, or those areas that are seen as kind of brownfields or wastelands, or many of them are then reclaimed, and used in urban greening places, or processes to make cities more livable, more exciting, more, sort of attractive economic centers, but also places for health and recreation, for wellness for higher quality of life. And this is where questions of inclusion, democracy and also political economy become really central, because how this kind of shift from the industrial to the post industrial to the Green City has occurred is very situated, and really depends on local decision making processes that scale up to the state as well. So how it looks in Sweden differs from how it looks in Denmark to how it looks in Finland, or how it might look in any other place.
Jasmin Adolph:But would you say- because you mentioned, or what I could hear, the three different almost ways of planning a city, it can become greener or more industrialized. Is there a way to plan a city to keep all these aspects in mind? Do you think they become more sustainable?
Natalie Marie Gulsrud:Sure. And don't misunderstand me, I was trying to give a bit of a historic trajectory, right. So I think all aspects of these kind of planning forms have taken place in cities over time. But if we look at general trends and a historic perspective, we can see that at certain times in history, urban greening has had more emphasis than it other times. And that has to do with kind of the way in which city planning sort of uses nature, or the role that nature maybe plays in city planning, if we want to put it that way. And there's some great literature on this. But there's some basic trends. So when we're talking about the Green City, what do we actually mean? The Green City includes green growth. So it absolutely has to do with kind of economic stimulus packages, ways in which we can think about green projects is also providing new jobs kind of economic attractiveness. The Richard Florida kind of thesis of the creative class, how do we attract these people that like bring vibrancy and creativeness to cities? If we look at another time period, like let's go back to the 1970s, we would have had different factors that were more important at that time, energy efficiency, still industrial jobs in the city. Cars are still kind of in the center. So there's different factors in which you you might look at the So for nowadays, like the contemporary furnace and crack green city. that it would be more urban greening? I would say, yeah. And what I would say is that every city has different challenges. But a primary challenge for everybody is climate change and climate change adaptation. How do we deal with that? So across a European scale, we have a continuum of sort of Arctic to, you know, desert, sort of conditions, or by other way down to Greece, we have a lot of drought, but we have frequent flash floods. If we look at sort of Arctic permafrost, we have different kinds of issues. And then in between, we have other sorts of zones. So every city is trying to adapt. urban greening is one way in which we think about nature based solutions to climate resilience. So urban greening can provide a lot of opportunities, a lot of benefits and co-benefits, you could say, to residents, to businesses, to nature itself. Yet, there are many challenges around how these benefits are realized. And who those benefits actually are for. And I can give some examples of it, if that would make it clear.
Jasmin Adolph:Yeah, please.
Natalie Marie Gulsrud:Sure. So if we look at Copenhagen, for example, the main challenge that Copenhagen is facing in terms of climate change, adaptation and mitigation is that there's an increasing amount of storm water, and rainfall. So the climate is getting warmer, and it's also getting wetter. So how do we deal with that increased amount of rain? Where does it go? And what can we do with it? And how does the city look when we have that much more water? In addition to the fact that sea levels are rising, right, so there's a couple of challenges there. And one way in which this is being dealt with, is by putting a lot of the water into sort of underground into bigger pipes. Yet, there's still the question of, can we deal with the rainwater on the surface as well? And can we look at sort of ways in which the ecosystems that are on site can actually become more robust, to absorb some of this water to support biodiversity, to support social learning and awareness around water, to support new forms of agriculture, to support new forms of play, to support new forms of kind of place, identity and understanding of the neighborhood? Etc.
Jasmin Adolph:Thank you so much for elaborating. I think for some, it always sounds super easy, or like, okay, we need to be more sustainable. And then they think this needs to be done without considering all these other factors that come in. So this was a great example of just showcasing how much there actually is to maybe just making one decision for one solution to a problem. So thank you for that.
Gaëtan Gamba:Also had a question to Natalie about, you know, we talk also a lot about Copenhagen as this very basically friendly city, and how this is also maybe, to some sense, like, tight with the culture. But was there also reluctance in Copenhagen, for example, when the city was developing as basically friendly? City?
Natalie Marie Gulsrud:Yeah, absolutely. So we can talk about waves of planning for bicycling in Copenhagen. If we go back to the beginning of the late 19th 20th century, we can see that bicycling was taking off kind of a global North scale. Lots of wealthy people had bicycles and we're riding them everywhere. And what's unique about the Danish case is that first and foremost, there's a tradition of kind of collective decision making. So the conflicts between motorists, as cars came on the roads, and bicyclists became apparent right away. So the motorist organization, together with engineers, and together with the cyclist organization, came up with a compromise and said, okay, we need to have infrastructure for everybody. And so in the 1920s, in the 1930s, it became law to actually build bicycle infrastructure alongside new roadways, and the other- The second kind of interesting thing about the Danish case is that Denmark has never produced cars. So we didn't have a car lobby to kind of put cars forward. If we look at the Swedish case, if we look at the German case, if we look at especially the American case, the car lobby, ran over every other voice. Literally. In the course of the early 20th century, to pave the way for cars has been the best form of transportation and taking up all kinds of public space, pushing people underground in metros to make the car more efficient on ground. We don't see that happening in the Danish context, and specifically in a Copenhagen context. The third thing is that because the Social Democrats were very much in power at that time, and the working class was sort of at the forefront of their decision making priorities. Cars were seen as a luxury good. They were not accessible to the everyday worker, therefore, they were not seen as a priority, and they were heavily taxed. So those the things in combination, explain how Copenhagen has become the bicycle city that it's become today. That said, there's been times of expansion, and of retraction. So we saw a lot of expansion until World War Two in the core of the city in terms of bicycle infrastructure, the post World War city became much more car oriented. There's famous pictures of sort of the center of Copenhagen, being filled with cars, parking spots everywhere. And for those of you who are familiar with the Olsen Banden films, which are a series of films that were made from the late 60s into the early 80s, with kind of this famous group of, of Danish actors, you can see how Copenhagen looked at that time, it was very industrial, and it was very car friendly. So the Copenhagen that we know today is a process, you know, a historic process around decision making, and actually has to do with the fact that citizens in the late 70s 80s, and 90s protested against the role of the car in the city. The lakes in the central part of Copenhagen were envisioned to be paved over and there should have been a freeway there. Citizens protested that and said, no, thank you. Planners listened. Alright, there's a longer story about why they listened, but they listened. Also, this kind of freeway expansion coincided with the oil crisis and energy crisis of the late 1970s. And at that time, there were restrictions on when people could drive their cars. And certain times of the week, it was only those who had absolutely urgent duties, such as doctors or police officers, firefighters that could actually use their car. So there's pictures of huge protests at city hall in Copenhagen, where people are coming out and saying, give us more options; let us ride our bikes safely. So we see this really grassroots movement. And in the late 1990s, Copenhagen was almost bankrupt. Many people don't know that. But the state was about to take over the city's finances. So a whole reorganization of how the city was planned, and sort of what the core values of the city were took place at that time. And the bicycle city and the Green City were core to that kind of rebranding in revisioning of what Copenhagen should be. Both is kind of like an entrepreneurial brand, green brand to attract people, but also as a very functional kind of way of getting to the city in a more environmentally friendly way.
Gaëtan Gamba:If we look at like cities, like Helsinki, for example, that is governed by government that is more like car friendly. Like, would you have any sorts of ideas to make these kind of like cities are a bit less aware or less oriented towards developing, for example, the bicycle in the cities happened?
Natalie Marie Gulsrud:Absolutely. So what oftentimes happens is people come to Copenhagen and they say, wow, it's a wonderful place to ride our bike, we could never do it in our city. And back in 2019, I wrote a book, together with Professor Jason Henderson from San Francisco State about how that is actually not true. It's called Street Fights in Copenhagen. And it focuses on the politics of green mobility and the politics of the car. And what's true about Copenhagen is that we have the same kind of struggles. Parking is a huge struggle. You know, only a third of Copenhageners have a car but that number is actually rising quite quickly, because that kind of famous expensive the taxation of the car has actually been dropped. We don't have that high of taxes on cars anymore. So it's much more affordable to buy a car and specifically younger people are buying more cars. And we see nationally that more and more youth are driving cars and less youth are riding bikes. So there's there's a decline there in Copenhagen and in Denmark overall.
Nicola Witcombe:This is a New Nordic Lexicon podcast on the connections between city planning and sustainability. As well as Gaëtan and Jasmin, there are other students who had come to Stockholm for the recording session for The New Nordic Lexicon, they discussed some good and bad examples of sustainability in the cities where they come from.
Agata Pyka:So, hello, everyone, my name is Agatha Pyka. I'm a journalism student in Aarhus, Denmark, and I'm also a freelance journalist. When you go to Aarhus, you can really see that the whole Bay, the harbour is covered with different types of industrial machines and industrial buildings. But when you talk with locals, and when you talk to experts, everyone says that it's becoming smaller and smaller. And when you go to the new parts of Aarhus, they are being slowly changed and turned into very modern living complexes, apartment blocks, but also different types of attractions such as community gardens, or cafes, restaurants, or public libraries. I think these are great examples of how we can change our public sphere, public area, and use it after the industry slowly moves out of a certain area.
Christian Lutro:My name is Christian Lutro, I am a student at the Bergen private gymnasium. One of the positive examples is in general is that Norwegians are extremely good at electric transport in general, electric cars are probably the most popular transport thing in Norway right now. It's kind of like a trend having an electric car even if it's a tad slower than, say, a Toyota, it doesn't really matter. It's very popular.
Jasmin Adolph:Hey, hi, my name is Jasmin. And I would like to share an example of the hometown I'm from, it's called Lüdenscheid from Germany, a kind of small town, but there are over 80,000 people living there. So not so small. Perhaps my mum just told me the other day that she is in possession now of a special public transport ticket that costs only, I think it costs only 40 euros or so. And she can go with every train she likes or every public transportation. And I think that's a great initiative. Whereas in comparison, she used to have to pay for a monthly ticket just to go around the city of Lüdenscheid that would cost 66 Euro. So now she can go like to the whole country, and it's even cheaper. And I think initiatives like this are great, especially for countries with people who love their cars, because Germans do love their cars as well.
Gaëtan Gamba:If we start to talk a bit with Romina, so you are a senior researcher and associate professor in environmental management and governance at Södertörn University. And you have looked at a lot the involvement of children and young people in planning processes.
Jasmin Adolph:For Romina, do you think it's perhaps easier to be sustainable in the city than on the countryside?
Romina Rodela:When we think about countryside in Europe, it's a product. Countries are the producers, and therefore has its own sustainability challenges, which are related to this but also to other things that maybe it's not now. But both of them have major challenges. And I think that we are in need to advance very steadily to move to alternative ways of producing food to be together in cities and to how we work. So we do need major changes to the practices we are currently driving.
Natalie Marie Gulsrud:I would say one of the challenges with the countryside is accessibility. So in a Danish context, I think it could be very romantic to live in the countryside. Many people have summer houses. But if you think about a permanent residency in a more rural community, what you're faced with is first and foremost, it does not feel safe to walk or to ride your bike, and there's not necessarily access to the school or to other kind of nature areas, by walking or by riding bike, therefore, you're forced to either wait for a bus and the service is not very good, unfortunately, and or you need to use a car. And that's maybe not the most sustainable option. So there's a contradiction there that people oftentimes move to the countryside to become closer to nature, to have a more relaxed life. But they then become much more reliant on cars. And the discourse in Denmark is that everything will be electrified, and that that's fine, we can then just drive electric cars. But I think this ties back into the question of intergenerational justice. What kind of a systems like are we entering? When we focus on electric cars that currently are very much dependent on precious metals like lithium, copper, other metals that need to be mined in very sensitive areas? These are key questions for now and also the future, not only about the future that we offer to our children, but the future that we offer to other children, specifically in these communities, that would be mined.
Jasmin Adolph:Exactly. And when thinking about the pandemic, it might have been a bit beneficent, to the Sustainable Thinking, because a lot of people were studying, working from home, they didn't have to commute those that were living in a countryside could stay there, basically. But what do you think, are we able to deduce anything about what happened during the pandemic, when it comes to city planning in the future?
Gaëtan Gamba:For example, like in Geneva, there was like creation of a lot of like bicycle lanes, during the pandemic, that then became more of a long term decision that they would not like give these lanes back to the, to the cars. So was there is some similar events happening maybe during the pandemic here as well?
Romina Rodela:Maybe I can answer for Sweden. So we also have the ? project, which was called ?, which was called Learning from Crisis. And we have been doing research in ?, whether they have been, you know, developing certain practices. But Sweden actually, when it comes to the pandemic, it's quite a unique case. Because we then, if you remember, approach the crisis a bit differently. And from the work we did in that community, and what it merged, rather than, you know, particular ways how to move around, people mostly work from home, or what we have found out, a lot of help was given within the community, particularly community that are less represented. So they came together to help each other. In areas with support from the state, what's missing? In Sweden, anything to do with health was managed through an application, a digital platform. And this platform was really challenging for first or second generation immigrants. So they got together and they helped each other to reach out to do the testing and so on. So what we found in this project was self help to merge very strongly. In this last represented communities, we have not looked at social economically stronger community, so I cannot speak for that. But for more general debate, what maybe I could mention is that those groups might have felt the consequences a bit less when it comes to day to day, they could work from home. Generally, they will have infrastructure in place, such as a computer a place to work. Social, culturally diverse communities in the suburbs, had small houses, harder to work from home. Homeschooling was very hard. So Sweden chose the eventual not to close school system, which was closed for most of other countries.
Natalie Marie Gulsrud:I mean, in Copenhagen, what we saw is that less people took public transit. So I would say that was kind of a negative impact. You could say that was potentially because people felt less comfortable being in closed spaces, could also be because people just were less mobile. And maybe they were walking or taking their bike. A positive thing, or kind of a unique thing that happened in a Copenhagen context is that we saw more space, from parking spots, and on sidewalks being given to outdoor serving. So outdoor space became more vibrant. Everybody was outside. And one of the aspects around that that was interesting is that some people thought it was really great. And others thought it was really noisy. And specifically if we think about the summer of 2020, in the summer of 21. This idea of like, who has access to green space at which hour? Should we be playing really loud music? Can you actually have a huge party in a neighborhood park? Are you able to like hold parties on sort of docks that are outside people's windows until three in the morning? These questions became quite relevant. And I think it piped right into the idea of like, Planning with Youth and planning for us, because what sort of a public life do we provide? And for whom? And in which kind of context? And I think these questions are always somewhat contested, and there's never perfect answers, and the time of corona kind of gave us that opportunity to look at that really, in a very up close and personal sense.
Gaëtan Gamba:That was very interesting. So as a conclusion, we talked a lot about like, different interests in this podcast. And on one side, we have this like inclusion of young people, that is really important. And on the other side, we also have this idea of sustainability and greening the urban environment that is stressing problematic. But what if, like young people also might not have such sustainable ideas. And other for example, in Finland was, like seen during the last elections that a lot of like young people would vote rather for the far right in the national elections. So what about these tendencies?
Romina Rodela:That's interesting, thanks for bringing that up. In fact, even in Sweden, during the last election, those who looked at how the first voters who were people who just turned 18, voted, were surprised to find out who they voted against expectations. So prevalently, if I remember correctly, this number was like 60% of those who were first time voters voted for the government to come, which is against this idea that the young people are always progressive, and so on. But what I can also put into perspective is the fact that intergenerational dialogue, which is a topic, and a concept, which we have on the table for decades, is always difficult, because you bring together different generation with very different life experience, and you don't know what the outcomes are. But it's important that young people are involved, because it's through this participatory processes through being engaged that actually they learn the practice of becoming a citizen, of being citizen,s being part of the community. They have the freedom of making up their own mind to learn to maybe reconsider the ideas they had before. And the fact maybe this is I mean, I don't know why first time voters, I don't have an answer any needed researchers who reported that you can assume why they voted in this way is because if you think of the past years, there is a lot of built in anxiety about safety, security, in the public debate. And if you think, who is those who might be most sensitive, or those who might be most impacted adults who need to go out, because going out from your parents home, allows you the chance to socialize, or the other moment in your life where you really need. And you cannot because there is a safety and security emergency and you need to find out always how to stay with your friends, and then you have a political party that promise that it will resolve. So I mean, this, I'm just guessing why they voted so and what the upturn of that could be. But inter generational dialogue, it's always been very difficult. Even the old philosophers in the in the Greek times have that as a topic, who looked at the young people, as someone who are radical, who thought about things that are very hard to put in place. But nevertheless, that's what we need to know. We need to rethink our models. We need someone who's challenging us and pushing pushing us further.
Natalie Marie Gulsrud:Children and Youth oftentimes reflect where we're at in our society today. And I would suggest that we're very much living in a time of fear. And many are suggesting that we need to think about hope, instead, and be much more hopeful for the future in order to kind of realize the radical transitions that we need to have a more just inclusive future, climate future specifically. And I'm really inspired by the work of Rebecca Solnit, and others who have recently given out a book that's called Not Too Late. And there are many youth activists who are co authors. But there's also experts from IPCC and other scientists who have contributed chapters, suggesting that all the data shows that it actually is not too late. We still have hope. So what does the political rhetoric way? What does data say? And how do we actually feel as people, as youth, as adults, as voters? These are really complex questions. It's interesting to think about that in the Nordic Nordic context. We have a lot of opportunity to work with that specifically in terms of how we plan for youth.
Gaëtan Gamba:And this message of hope, and applying positive thinking, I thank you very much for participating in this podcast. I don't know if Jasmine wants to add something?
Jasmin Adolph:I love that you ended it on such a positive note because it's easy when thinking about climate and climate anxiety that comes with it to the young people often feel very hopeless. And so thank you just for mentioning that. At the end. It's, we would like to thank the research group of which nordics.info was a part Reimagining Norden in an Evolving World, particularly the branch at Södertörn University for supporting this podcast. We would also like to thank the A.P. Møller Foundation for supporting The New Nordic Lexicon. And thank you both Natalie and Romina for your time. It was a pleasure interviewing you guys.
Romina Rodela:Thank you. Likewise.
Gaëtan Gamba:Thank you very much.
Natalie Marie Gulsrud:Thank you so much for this opportunity.
Nicola Witcombe:The researchers you've been listening to a Romina Rodela from Södertörn University and Natalie Gulsrud from Copenhagen University. The students interviewing on this podcast are Gaëtan Gamba, from Helsinki University and Jasmine Adolph, an alumni from Södertörn University. The New Nordic Lexicon podcast series will mainly be in English with some episodes in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. Subjects range from the invasion of Ukraine and security in Europe to minority languages in Finland and Sweden. The New Nordic Lexicon is brought to you by the team behind nordics.info at Aarhus University in Denmark, the students and colleagues from across the Nordics and beyond.