Case Studies   The Danish Neighbourhood Regeneration Programme. Kvarterløft in Copenhagen

Sector division of funding

The sector division of funding works against the holistic idea of the project – because it makes it very difficult to move money from one sector to another. The largest amount of money is for urban renewal. Renovating housing is not very visible in the neighbourhood – and the amount of money given is not enough to renovate more than a small part of the 9000 houses in the neighbourhood. You could perhaps get more visible results if you were allowed to use this money to renovate the outer physical landscape of the neighbourhood (streets, squares etc), but this is not possible due to the structure of the funding.

This system is also complicated to explain to the local stakeholders, who are perhaps not trained in understanding complicated financial structures.

At the beginning of the national programme the various ministries discussed the possibility for creating a system of funding where they effectively would create one big source of money that the local programmes could apply for. This was not possible, so the project workers have been forced to work with extensive fund-raising with various ministries – which have their specific purposes and objectives for funding activities. Therefore in some cases you tend to go to where the money is – and adapt your activity to that – rather than the other way round. It also creates extra work in a small secretariat, as you have to spend a lot of time on fundraising, reporting on both progress and economy for each activity.

3.8 Financing    3.8.2 Can we change the way things operate without extra funding?