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The Copenhagen Way: lessons from a city that plays the long game
Earlier this summer, just a few months after joining Stories, I went with the whole company on a study trip to Copenhagen - experiencing the city by bike, on foot and in the water.
We set out with an ambitious programme of tours, conversations and plenty of discussion about development and city-making, with enough fun built in to make it feel like a proper Stories trip.
Copenhagen’s reputation is well-established. It is known for its cycling culture, clean harbour, generous public spaces, distinctive architecture and consistently high quality of life. We wanted to see those things for ourselves, but also to understand the decisions and collaborations that sit behind them.
With generous help from our new friends at BRIQ, Urban Partners and Schulze+Grassov, we packed a huge amount into a few days. What stayed with me was not a single building, neighbourhood or piece of infrastructure, but the consistency of thought connecting them: a long-term ambition for the city, supported by leadership and investment over decades.
The visible city rests on an invisible system
It is easy to visit Copenhagen and focus on the visible results: people swimming in the harbour, children being carried around in cargo bikes, carefully designed public spaces and new neighbourhoods connected by efficient public transport.
What is harder to see is the system that made those things possible.
During our trip we were introduced to The Copenhagen Way, a report produced by BLOXHUB, Ramboll, and Urban Partners that describes how Copenhagen transformed itself from a city facing population decline, unemployment and near municipal bankruptcy in the early 1990s into the place we see today.
The report’s central lesson is that this transformation did not result from a single masterplan, flagship project or visionary individual. It was achieved incrementally, through a sustained combination of long-term planning, institutional innovation, patient investment and collaboration between the public, private and civic sectors.
It isn’t possible to copy Copenhagen, with its own political, financial and cultural context. It still faces significant challenges, not least the major one facing all desirable places: housing affordability and the cost of living. I think the more useful question is what we can learn from the way it works.
For me, three key lessons stood out.
Treat infrastructure and development as one conversation
The relationship between transport, land and development is especially clear in Copenhagen.
The metro was not considered simply as a way to meet existing transport patterns. It was planned alongside the development of underused land, generating income to support the infrastructure itself and so helping to unlock new neighbourhoods and increasing land values.
Through ‘By & Havn’, publicly owned land, planning powers, commercial delivery expertise and long-term capital have been brought together within a structure capable of turning strategic ambition into delivery.
For someone like me with a background in development viability, this was particularly striking. Copenhagen has not made economics secondary to good city-making. Instead, it has worked to create models in which investment in infrastructure and quality helps generate the value needed to deliver them.
The question moves beyond “can this project afford the infrastructure?” to “what value could that infrastructure create, and how can we capture and reinvest it?”
See liveability as productive infrastructure
One of the strongest impressions from the trip was that Copenhagen does not appear to treat public life as the decorative layer added once the “real” development has been completed.
The clean harbour, cycle routes, public spaces, cultural institutions and landscape are fundamental parts of how the city functions. They support health and wellbeing, but they also attract people, businesses and investment, strengthen the identity of neighbourhoods and reduce long-term development risk.
The transformation of the harbour captures this particularly well. Cleaning the water and opening the waterfront to the public created a major civic amenity and made the surrounding districts measurably more attractive and investable.
There is an important commercial lesson here. Quality public realm and social and environmental outcomes should not always be understood as immediate costs competing with value. Designed and delivered well, they are among the things that create lasting value.
Building partnerships that are alliances
We heard about all sorts of partnerships between municipalities, developers, investors, utilities, designers, cultural organisations and communities.
These alliances allow different organisations to contribute what they are best placed to provide: land, capital, powers, expertise, local knowledge or delivery capacity. They also create a shared responsibility for outcomes that extend beyond the boundary or timescale of an individual project. This does not mean that interests always align or that difficult commercial questions disappear. But Copenhagen shows what can become possible when partnerships are structured around a shared long-term mission.
'Mission aligned partnerships' felt closely aligned with the way we seek to approach our projects at Stories. Complex regeneration requires relationships that can withstand challenge, adapt to change and keep people focused on the place they are collectively trying to create.
Bringing the lessons home
I returned from my first Stories trip inspired, but also with a useful sense of challenge.
Copenhagen’s achievements were built over a generation. They required institutions with the confidence to invest for the long term, political leadership prepared to maintain a direction, and partners willing to share responsibility for outcomes.
The UK context today is different, and there is no simple formula to import. But the principles travel well: connect infrastructure with land and value, treat liveability as an investment, and create partnerships capable of adapting.
The Copenhagen Way is a way of thinking that asks us to be ambitious about the outcomes we want, practical about how we deliver them and patient enough to allow good decisions to compound over time.
That is a valuable lesson for anyone involved in shaping places, and a pretty memorable introduction to Stories.
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