Results of the competition The Sustainable City of the Future

Out of a total of 180 proposals, the best were selected by a twenty-member jury of the competition The Sustainable City of the Future, which took place in Copenhagen, Denmark, from May to September of last year.
The subject of the competition was the design of a future urban district on the site of the Copenhagen harbor Nordhavn. With an area of 200 hectares (over 300 hectares including the planned reclaimed area), this is the largest Scandinavian development project. During the next 50 years, 40,000 residents and 40,000 jobs are expected to find their home in an area of 3-4 million m² of floor space. The organizer of the competition, CPH City & Port Development, in which the city of Copenhagen and the Danish state hold shares, had a significant goal: to obtain not only proposals for this specific location, but also to create a kind of standard for what similarly large development projects should look like in the future.
The main theme of the competition was sustainability - environmental, social, and economic. Contestants were tasked with presenting a spatial concept and structural plan for the entire area, where the continuity with the context of the whole city had to be clearly presented, a hierarchy of spaces, urban parks, water areas, and small greenery had to be created. Emphasis was placed on diverse urban life and on transportation infrastructure - connecting the entire area to the surroundings, the use of public transport, bicycles, and walking. The detailed zoning plan was to include primarily a part of the area - Indre Nordhaven. Here, urban life, the hierarchy of urban spaces, and building typologies had to be clearly illustrated.
Scandinavian urban planning competitions are characterized by very careful preparation, a clearly defined vision, openness, and public participation plays an important role in the preparation and in the further process (similar was the case in the earlier Copenhagen competition in the Carlsberg brewery location). Organizers typically aim to obtain diverse opinions on possible solutions and not just to issue the order as quickly and opaquely as possible or sell the entire area to one private developer. Therefore, three first places were ultimately awarded (with a reward of 600,000 DKK for each winning team), two second places, two third places, and four other rewards. Based on the evaluation of all the competition proposals, the jury prepared a comprehensive Jury Report, summarizing the main contributions of the competition for further planning. After a series of public and non-public presentations, one of the winning teams will be selected at the beginning of March to oversee the realization of the project.
The tradition of quality urban planning competitions was reflected in the fact that most of the awarded proposals came from Scandinavian offices. Although 180 teams from 36 countries submitted their proposals to the competition (three proposals were submitted from the Czech Republic), among the 11 awarded proposals, there were 5 Danish, two Norwegian, one from Great Britain, one Swedish, and one Finnish.
The first winning proposal from the Danish office Polyform (in collaboration with Cenergia Energi Consulting, Deloitte and Oluf Jørgensen A/S) is based on experiences from other cities and supplemented with visions for the future. The second winning proposal was developed by the Danish office COBE in collaboration with SLETH and Rambøll. The authors proposed to divide Nordhaven into a series of islands, each with its own identity. The last winning proposal was created by the offices 70° architecture and Dahl & Uhre Architects from Norway. The landscape-oriented project plans to create a green belt at the edge of the entire area.

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