Case Studies

The Kongens Enghave programme is part of a national programme of urban regeneration in Denmark. This programme has national evaluators and therefore all programmes are followed by By og Byg (Danish Building and Urban Research). They follow the process and the individual projects in all 7 programmes of the first generation Kvarterløft.

Each neighbourhood has had to formulate measurable success criteria – and these were built into the agreement between the municipality of Copenhagen and the Ministry of Integration.

To follow up on the success-criteria and the action plan each programme each year have to give an annual detailed report on separate projects and activities. Supplementing this is a series of reports on aspects of the process of regeneration (resident involvement, decision making, business).

This might be adequate for evaluating the national programme for Kvarterløft, but experience has shown that it does not meet the need of the local Kvarterløft projects as the information gathered is very general and looks backwards rather than forwards.

The final report of the evaluation will appear in the spring of 2003. A major part of this will consist of an image analysis based on a survey in 1998 and 2002.

The survey shows the development in local people's view of their own neighbourhoods. It contains questions on image, safety, networks etc. The image analysis of Kongens Enghave showed considerably progress – and this was confirmed by an analysis done in the winter of 2002/03 on the development in the housing sector. Both surveys show a marked improvement on the way the neighbourhood has progressed and positive expectations to the future development.

The conclusion of the evaluation with regard to Kongens Enghave is that the Kvarterløft programme has taken some significant steps toward a change in the neighbourhood, but that there is still a long way to go.