balcony blight has spread to Jægersborggade *

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With Coronavirus lockdown restrictions, it has been many months since I have been up to Jægersborggade but Saturday was sunny, and I needed some exercise, so I walked up to the lakes and then on along Nørrebrogade and through Assistens Kirkegård.

As soon as I got into Jægersborggade, opposite the north gate of the cemetery, I could see that construction work had started to add balconies to the front of several of the west-facing buildings.

This whole business of retrofitting older apartment buildings with new balconies has become a serious problem in the city.

Copenhagen has a phenomenal number of good apartment blocks that date from the 19th and the early 20th century ... apartments that were built on new squares and new streets as the city expanded rapidly with large new districts built over the fields and gardens beyond the old city gates.

Most of these apartments still form an important part of the housing stock in Copenhagen and most, even if the original arrangement of rooms was restricted or not completely appropriate for the way we live now, they can be easily adapted .... so heating and bathrooms and so on can all be upgraded. Even replacement doors and windows that comply with modern building standards for sound and heat insulation can be found in an appropriate style and colour that either replicate or compliment the original fittings.

But few of these buildings had balconies.

Of course, I can see why people want a balcony and particularly a balcony that faces the sun or looks across an attractive street or square. A balcony can bring extra light into a room; can be a space to grow herbs or plants; and, if large enough, can be a place to sit and sunbathe or even provide space outside to have a table and chairs for a meal.

Balconies are fine when they form part of the original design and are part of the original construction on apartment buildings from the 1930s or on modern buildings but inserted on the street frontage, they inevitably slam through the original architectural features of the facade, compromise any architectural style the building may have; add what are often little more than stark metal boxes across the front and usually throw shadow across the windows of the apartment below.

With many of these older apartment buildings, the street frontage and a main staircase, are the only parts with any architectural coherence. In most, the back of the building is far less distinguished or, worse, a muddle of toilets and back or kitchen staircases but rooms on the back of the apartment can look down into gardens or attractive courtyards  so balconies added to the rear of building are rarely an issue.

* blight covers green leaves on a plant or tree with ugly and disfiguring areas

shopping in Jægersborggade - December 2018
Jægersborggade - May 2021
retrofitting balconies is a problem - January 2020 

 
 

new balconies from a walk down through Østerbro and on to Dronning Louises Bro

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By coincidence, just two days before walking over to Jægersborggade, I had been up to Østerbro and walked back through Østerbro and through the streets on the outer side of the lakes.

Most of the apartment buildings on these streets date from the 1880s and 1890s or from the first decade of the 20th century and, again, it was possibly a year or more since I had been to this part of the city.

Yet again, I was amazed and depressed by seeing just how many of these good buildings had been altered with the addition of new balconies on the street fronts.

The city planning system really has to control this.

Even if permission is still given for new balconies to be added to the garden or courtyard side of a building, the presumption has to be that new balconies cannot be added to a street front unless there are exceptional reasons or an exceptional design and certainly not when it means cutting through original architectural features.

Can anyone in the city planning department defend the decision to give permision for the addition of any of these balconies or convince me that they contribute in any way to the street scape?

 

select any image to open as a slideshow

 

retrofitting balconies is a problem

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If you live in an apartment in Copenhagen, a balcony can be a real asset.

If the balcony is small but faces in the right direction then it’s a place to grow a few flowers or herbs or if it’s large enough for a chair or two and a table, it can even be a useful extra room - at least on sunny days.

Through the 18th and 19th centuries in Copenhagen, a balcony was usually a grand architectural statement … a feature of bigger and better houses and these balconies were usually on the street frontage and on the most important floor level, so, more often than not, on the first floor and, more often than not, the balcony was defined or marked by a display of impressive or pretentious architectural details … so under a pediment or flanked by columns and with an elaborate iron railing or a stone balustrade and was there to impress … more a place from which to make a speech to the crowd than a place to lounge in the sun.

But by the 1920s, people living in the city had discovered sun and fresh air and, generally, as apartments became smaller and as purpose-built apartment buildings tended to get larger, balconies became more common.

They meant the apartment had a private outdoor space, so people did not have to go down to the courtyard to be outside, and, if the balcony was on the front of a building, then there could be a view out over the street or, in well-located apartment buildings, the view could be over a square or over the lakes or even over the sound. 

With the use of concrete and steel in the construction of more and more new buildings, it became possible to cantilever out ever larger balconies and by the 1930s apartment buildings became common where every apartment had a balcony and with those balconies often forming the dominant feature across the facade. In some buildings, it was almost as if the balconies had been designed first and everything else made to fit behind.

Glazed doors to get out on to the balcony bring more light into the room and on, hot days, the doors can be left open to improve the circulation of air …. so what’s not to like.

But there is a growing problem with retrofitting balconies on buildings that did not have them originally.

Not too much of a problem, in terms of the look of a building, if they are on the courtyard side and even acceptable on the street frontage if secondary balconies are placed carefully and try to show at least some respect for the style and architectural articulation of the building. 

But, too often, these secondary balconies are simply metal boxes clamped across the front and, if nothing else, they increase the visual clutter of the street - diminish the streetscape - and, if not all the owners or tenants want the disruption or the expense of knocking out walls below windows for doorways and for constructing the required supports for the balconies - they can be spread randomly across an otherwise regular frontage.

Worse, when placed across the sunny side of the building, new balconies can throw deep shadows across windows below so actually they mean less light for those lower rooms and, in some cases, balconies above will take away an unimpeded view of the sky when someone is in the room below.

It’s difficult. Obviously people like and want a balcony and who is a mere planner to say they can’t have one?

But now they really do have to be reigned back and controlled.

Copenhagen has a phenomenal stock of well-built apartments that date from across the last three centuries and with modern materials for glazing and with modern and efficient heating systems and insulation we can give these older buildings an important extended life and, without doubt, buildings only survive if they can be adapted for changes in the way we want to live. But too many good buildings are being devalued by poorly thought out balconies and too often these end up simply as extra space to store kids toys or the best bike that cannot be left in the courtyard or a barbecue that once seemed like a nice idea but somehow now is rarely used.

An apartment building on the corner of Sønder Boulevard and Sommerstedgade (left) and an apartment building on Broagergade are two examples where it could be argued that balconies add interest to otherwise stark or plain facades but both show clearly the problem with balconies throwing deep shadows across windows below

Skydebanegade (below left) and Nordre Fasanvej in Frederiksberg are examples where courtyards have been cleared of buildings and new balconies added to rooms at the back of the apartments that look down to the courtyard.

Overgaden Oven Vandet - expensive balconies added to an apartment building from the late 19th century
pairs of window were lowered for access to a long balcony but this meant the removal of aprons or panels below the windows and distinct features like key stones above windows were partly covered so changing the careful articulation of the original design

Tavsensgade housing scheme on the west side of Assistens Kirkegaard was designed by Povl Baumann and completed in 1920

the architecture of the brick blocks is severe but this is a major and influential group of buildings of considerable historic importance.

balconies have been added in a random pattern across the street frontages

Tåsingegade … a scheme to upgrade these apartments in Nørrebro has more justification …
balconies were added across the front of all the apartments to look down on new climate-change improvements on the square and this gives people a stronger sense of community and a stronger sense of ownership and participation in the improvements to their street

 
 

Rejsbygade - an apartment close to Enghave Parken - and a building on Sønder Boulevard have new balconies on what were blank gable walls … both seem to be associated with small areas of garden where adjoining buildings have been demolished

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waste collection on Nyhavn

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The photograph of rubbish piled around a street bin - posted with a quotation from Paul Mazur on Black Friday - was actually taken on the morning of Black Friday.

I had planned to post the quote because it seemed appropriate for this odd day that was contrived by marketing men in the States to make people spend. It’s the day after Thanksgiving - that public holiday when you spend time with families rather than spend money shopping - so presumably Black Friday is the bargain sale to hook you back into spending, just in case you forgot how spend having just had a day off. Is the message here that if you buy something you don't need then at least buy it at a knock-down price? Or maybe if you don't actually need it then by offering it at a sale price you might be persuaded to change your mind.

Anyway, I was heading out to take a photograph at the recycle centre on Amager - to go with the quote - but then there was this on the quay right outside my front door.

Everything had been abandoned - including a large and fairly new suitcase along with a good small metal case and various pictures in frames - so it looked as if someone is moving on from one of the apartments around here and what they were not taking with them had been dumped on the pavement sometime during the night. At least it gave me as good an image as any to represent our throw-away society.

Nyhavn, or New Harbour, was constructed in the 1670s for ships to load and unload goods. Over 400 metres long and 28 metres wide - it runs back from the main open harbour to the large public square of Kongens Nytorv

In any case, the bin system here is of interest and I had been thinking about a post for some time. It might look like an ordinary street bin but it's one of a line of bins along the quay that are the above-ground part of a sophisticated waste system from ENVAC.

When rubbish is dropped in, it doesn't go into a basket or inner bin that has to be emptied but it drops down into a buried pipe that is 500 mm in diameter and when the bin is full, triggered bt a level sensor, the waste is drawn through by vacuum to a service access point set down into the road at the end of the quay.

Nyhavn has large city blocks running back from the harbour on either side and is one of the most densely built up parts of the city with tightly-packed back buildings and small courtyards with homes and offices behind the street frontages. Not only is there little space for large modern waste bins in these yards but there is also a problem getting to the courtyards to empty any bins to take away waste. The quay, on this the north side of Nyhavn, was pedestrianised in the 1980s and although there is access for deliveries, the quay is normally thronged with tourists and there are around thirty restaurants just along this side and most of them have umbrellas and chairs and tables outside that are tightly packed together and most are there year round, so getting through to the archways, to get into and out of the courtyards, is difficult.

The only clue that the bins might not be ordinary street bins is the size - large for a street bin - and the slightly unusual port-hole style door but, presumably, very few tourists stop to wonder why.

They are 1.36 metres high and just over 70cm in diameter and are designed to take all the household waste from the apartments above the restaurants and from the apartments in the inner courtyard buildings - so some 150 apartments in total. That waste is dropped in through the small round hatch. For commercial waste - from the restaurants and bars - they have keys to open the full square opening to put in larger bags of rubbish and packaging.

Designed by Erik Brandt Dam and installed in May 2012 - when the system was upgraded - there are eight large waste bins along the quay - along the 760 metres from Kongens Nytorv to the harbour - with eight smaller bins at intermediate intervals for street litter. These smaller bins look more like traditional street bins, with narrow slots for rubbish on each side, but they also drop their contents down into the system.

The Nyhavn waste system, with sixteen bins and the service point down at the theatre end of the quay, deals with 60 tonnes of waste a week.

bins for the new ENVAC waste system in the Bella Quarter in Copenhagen

The advantage is that the waste is dealt with quickly and cleanly and few people are disturbed when the system is emptied but one drawback is that there is less incentive, with this Nyhavn set up, for people to sort their rubbish for recycling. On the quay, there is now one large standard recycle bin for glass, tucked away round a corner, close to the Theatre, down near the main harbour, but otherwise plastic, paper and cardboard, metal and batteries have to be taken to recycle points several blocks away - the nearest are on the other side of the harbour - or people will put everything through the ENVAC system to end at the incinerator.

A decade ago this system was seen as cutting-edge for waste disposal - good because waste was not going to landfill but to a district incinerator as fuel for the generation of hot water for the district heating system - but for new residential areas in Copenhagen there is now an opportunity to build in more ambitious waste collection systems.

In a new development in Ørestad - for the courtyards and pedestrian streets in the Bella Quarter - ENVAC are installing a waste system where there are not single bins but five separate bins at each waste collection point and each marked for separate and different waste to be recycled so residents can sort out waste quickly and easily - just outside their apartment. Then, as with the Nyhavn set up, it is drawn by vacuum to a service point where it is collected for processing.

This keeps the area close to homes free of smells and free of the lorries that take away the waste. According to the company web site, the system can daw rubbish through a distance up to 2 kilometres.

Another problem in Nyhavn is that restaurant staff, for understandable reasons, tired and at the end of a long work shift, drag out rubbish and force it down through the hatch so the bins do get blocked. It triggers a sort of waste indigestion with lots of weird noises coming up from underground.

Restaurants should use smaller rubbish bags but that would mean more trips between the kitchen and the bin.

Some people fail to realise that underground, just below the bin, the vertical drop has to take the waste through a right angle to go into the horizontal pipe that runs along to the service point so I have seen some ridiculously long and inflexible things being forced through the hatch and then the service team have to come out and sort out the blockage. It was only recently that I realised that they can control the pumps for the pneumatics remotely from the van … so clear a bit … suck a bit … repack a bit …. suck a bit until the blockage is cleared. In Danish the vacuum system is called affaldssug and Google translates this rather literally as ‘waste sucks’ ….. a good motto for any movement lobbying against conspicuous consumption.

ENVAC

 

Ét Danmark uden parallelsamfund / One Denmark without a parallel society

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ghetto.jpeg

This was a difficult post to write because it is about sensitive political and social issues but the subject is important and not least because there very specific implications for planning and housing in Denmark that will influence future policies for planning and should have a much wider relevance and for many if not most countries.

In the New Year the government published a report - Ét Danmark uden parallelsamfund / One Denmark without a parallel society - that sets out a policy to tackle problems in some urban areas in Denmark that will now be defined officially as ghettoes.

My immediate image of a ghetto - the picture conjured up by that word - is of crowded and poorly-built and or badly-kept buildings that are occupied by people kept there by poverty, isolated from wider society and from wealthier neighbourhoods, often nearby - so slum housing - so people, for different reasons, trapped and living with high levels of deprivation.

Here, obviously, I have to admit that I have had a relatively privileged and very middle-class life growing up in a very beautiful university town and then in well-designed modern housing in a new town. When I went away to university I went to Manchester to study art history - you can hardly get more middle class - and I loved the grandeur of the Victorian city and lived initially in what had been, in the 19th century, a private gated street of large villas. But that was just two blocks away from Moss Side … then defined officially as being the worst slums in Europe. Worse than Naples or Marseilles or Glasgow. Recently I came across some images of the slums in Moss Side and other parts of Manchester taken by Nick Hedges - a photo journalist - at exactly the time I lived nearby and I was truly shocked because it made me realise that time has blunted my memory of just how grim that area was and my memory had blotted out what was the reality of life for many people who lived there less than fifty years ago.

 

Since then I have driven through Soweto, seen Baltimore and travelled through much of South America so I am not naïve about the reality of poverty and deprivation - just naïve about how you deal with it.

I feel strongly that anyone and everyone visiting New York should go to the Tenement Museum and people should look at photographs of slum housing in London in the 1930s and in the 1950s and 1960s for a realistic context to understand just how recently that sort of housing was a reality in what are now very wealthy cities. There is a tendency in the affluent west to be blind to just how recently that sort of poverty and that sort of housing existed in their own countries.

In Denmark the definition, by the current government, of specific housing or distinct areas as ghettoes does not, in fact, stem from or define that extreme sort of housing but is about what problems that have developed as people migrate to Denmark but want, as most humans do, to be with people who have a common background and often a common language. Many Danes are aware that, in the worst situations, this can lead to isolation of communities and then on to a cycle of relative poverty and problems with education and employment that can trap people. And when people are trapped they do not benefit, as much as they should, from being an integrated part of Danish society. There is a growing concern that being isolated really does increase social problems - particularly for boys and young adults, and their membership of gangs - and it is that isolation that is described as living in a parallel society.

It is difficult because visitors - and presumably many migrants - coming to Denmark see affluence and see tolerance and see a freedom of life with enviable choices and then make the assumption that that was and is an easily achieved privilege. Actually, it has to be remembered that for older Danes, many can remember the slum housing in Vesterbro - as bad as anything in Manchester - or the slums that were cleared away in the 1950s from the area around Borgergade - not far north of the royal palace - and they know that their high quality of life now has been achieved through social and political changes and not simply dished out. I cannot recommend enough a visit to Arbejdermuseet - the Workers' Museum in Rømersgade - to find out more about working conditions and living conditions for many families in Copenhagen through the 19th and 20th centuries.

Of course the problem for migrants, in search of a better life but finding themselves isolated and trapped, is not just a problem in Scandinavia or for the affluent west but is a global problem and not just about the equitable distribution of opportunity and resources but how you can expect people to be taunted by affluence through advertising and merchandise sold to them, but remain content with what they do or, more often, don’t have.

And, of course, the problems tend to be seen as the consequence of migration from one country or one continent to another but is just as relevant with mass movements of people from rural to urban areas within a single country. This is really about managing expectations and managing numbers.

In Denmark, twenty-two initiatives have been set out by the government for urban areas that have problems seen to come from people living in a community that, for many different reasons, are isolated and parallel communities. Funding will now be available for demolishing some housing and for improving some areas but also there will be measures targeted at education with a focus on vulnerable children. Sixteen ‘ghettoes’ have been identified and substantial amounts of funding have been allocated to make the changes set out in the report.

Much of the programme to deal with these ghettoes is about social housing and about the stock of older housing - some from the 1920s and 1930s but also from the post-war period - so housing that would not be built in that way now … and it's about learning lessons and about trying to prevent more problems down the line through intervention now through education and through focused urban planning.