Life in a Suburb – Take a Second Look

Cross-posted from the Gehl Architects blog, Cities for People The issues of suburbia, the everyday, creating better public spaces for everybody, not only in the city centers, seem more pressing than ever for many reasons: the environmental effects of our building and transport patterns, an aging housing mass, a changing demography with shrinking households, the need to be attractive to compete with other cities and regions, etc. Despite many visions, competitions and initiatives, there are still many unanswered questions when it comes to the suburbs and everyday spaces.. Try to find good examples, it can be quite hard, and often what you come up with are the usual suspects. However, many suburban projects in suburbs are on now on their way and for good reason as more than half the population either live or work in the suburbs. I must admit that I find the everyday spaces of the suburbs some of the most interesting to work with. Suburbs are often hard to grasp, they may even seem a bit banal, but this is what makes them so interesting. The thing is that when you start to take a second look, you will soon realize that the suburbs are much more complex than at first glance. There is lots of life happening in a suburb like Gladsaxe, located around 10 kilometers north of Copenhagen, but you may have to look a little longer and more indoors or in private settings to find it. We have recently had the pleasure to work with the Municipality of Gladsaxe, a true suburb, built in the 60’s with zones for housing, recreation, work, etc. It has been great to work with a municipality that has been really open to investigate what life in Gladsaxe means. The result is a study of life encompassed into a report called GladsaxeLife [GladsaxeLiv in Danish] which reveals specific qualities in Gladsaxe, not suburbs in general and not public life in general. Life in Gladsaxe is not the same as life in the city centers, it has other qualities, it takes place more indoors than outdoors, and it may be more private and tend to be somehow overlooked. We have looked at where life takes place: the train station, the main street – the obvious places – but also the libraries which have high numbers of visitors (800.000 a year) – a meeting place that is non-commercial, democratic, innovative and a knowledge driven space. However, the libraries are enclosed buildings, life is not visible and that is one of the major recommendations to make all the life which is already taking place in Gladsaxe more visible. At one of the local supermarkets the number of visitors is the same, but these everyday spaces, the sidewalk outside the supermarket are not necessarily seen as crucial for life in Gladsaxe. We are somehow stuck in our traditional typologies, but instead of creating new, vast squares, it makes sense to build on the already existing, create new small scale meeting places, celebrate the everyday and all the engaged people in a place like Gladsaxe. It is about taking a second look, where do people meet, how can we add functions and other elements that can spice things up without resorting to wanna-be-urban spaces or the standard café latte answer. To work across indoor/outdoor, private/public, it is necessary to work across silos in the municipalities to make it work as well as including external partners. In the coming months we will continue to work with the municipality of Gladsaxe with an education program, combined with live work on hotspots, on selected sites where we are going to test new ideas. The answer to what life in a Copenhagen suburb might be does not exist already, but we hope Gladsaxe will soon be able to present new versions of suburban spaces in the coming months and years.