Case Studies   The Danish Neighbourhood Regeneration Programme. Kvarterløft in Copenhagen

Strategy

When the Kvarterløft project was set up in Kongens Enghave it was based on a set of preconditions:

• National legislation on neighbourhood based regeneration
• A municipality act on decentralisation of government and administration
• A municipality decision that Kongens Enghave would be a both a Local Council neighbourhood and a regeneration neighbourhood
• Information about the social, economic, environmental, physical conditions

The principles guiding this work were from the beginning:

• Participation
• Organisation
• Structures (5 theme areas: Physical Issues, Housing, Culture, Employment, and Social Issues)
• Pilot project timetable

In this phase there was no clearly formulated strategy for the regeneration. In fact the steering group was very careful not to have too fixed plans – in order to allow the local stakeholders to be the ones to formulate the ideas for a strategy.

Work was concentrating on the process – for example the steering group in the summer of 1997 arranged a series of dialogue meetings with major stakeholder groups.

In October 1997 the local secretariat was set up – and this was also the time when the programme had its first public meetings where we:

• Invited people to formulate goals and objectives for each theme areas
• Asked people to identify issues to be tackled
• Asked people to join Working Groups to discuss action

The working groups worked for 2½ months until the beginning of January 1998. Ending the work of the working groups the project had a big conference in early January where:

• Working groups came up with 80 proposals for action
• These were presented to ‘major' stakeholders and the other working groups
• This started a discussion on prioritising the many proposals – and discussing the procedure for doing so.

The result of the conference was:

• That the project created 5 theme groups – by putting the working groups together
• That these theme groups recommend goals and objectives and prioritised the 80 proposals for action
• That the project would have a public meeting presenting the proposals for the neighbourhood as the action plan.

The action plan was presented to the steering group – and was later approved in the Municipality of Copenhagen and Ministry.

Examples of projects/ideas for action in the plan:

• The creation of the Green Job-house as a local job-centre
• The Green Nerve – a street-scape project to tie the neighbourhood together
• A multi-media centre
• Rebuilding of existing housing to create bigger flats
• Reduction of the problems arising from the traffic in the neighbourhood

3.2.3 Dialogue meetings – and informal interviews    3.3 Visions