Case Studies   The Danish Neighbourhood Regeneration Programme. Kvarterløft in Copenhagen

2. Kvarterløft in Copenhagen

The municipality of Copenhagen at the present runs 5 regeneration projects of the Kvarterløft type and 2 local partnership projects. Apart from these there is a number of more socially orientated projects mainly centred around social housing estates. These projects are all born out of the national policy for urban affairs created by the Social Democratic Government of the 90’s.

The Kvarterløft projects are located in the financial department of the municipality. Politically the projects are placed under the Finance Committee that constitutes the senior political steering group for the Kvarterløft projects in Copenhagen. The committee make the final and ultimate decisions about the projects and their economy.

The Kvarterløft Secretariat in the Department of Finance is the co-ordinating link between the central organisation and the local organisation. The tasks of the Kvarterløft Secretariat are to serve the Finance Committee and the Reference Group for the project, handle the municipal departments’ activities in the Kvarterløft neighbourhoods, support the local project secretariats and handle the contact to the local steering groups.

The municipal administration is organised in 7 different departments – each with their own mayor. The mayors represent different political parties - sometimes with conflicting interests - making co-ordination complicated. Because the projects run across the various sectors an administrative reference group have been set up.

The Reference Group consists of Heads of Secretariat and other public officers in central positions who represent all the municipality’s departments. The function of the Reference Group is to ensure that each department give higher priority to the Kvarterløft neighbourhoods and also to ensure interdisciplinary co-ordination between the departments’ activities in the Kvarterløft neighbourhoods.

All the Kvarterløft areas have a local project secretariat. The tasks of the local project secretariats are to support the involvement of local residents for example by holding public meetings and steering group meetings, and to assist the project groups in both technical and practical matters.

1.2.3 The planning act     2.0.1 The three stages of Kvarterløft