fresh herbs from Irma

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The large Irma food store alongside the railway station at Østerport in Copenhagen is now selling herbs that are grown in the store and they are growing in full view in the middle of the vegetable section immediately inside the entrance.

There is a large double cabinet with a hefty black frame but with glass on the sides and in both the doors. It looks a bit like the normal cool cabinets used now in many food stores to keep salad stuff fresh although here there are four shelves in each half and on each shelf a turntable but instead of a flat platter these turntables have grooves or channels that spiral out from the centre.

Herbs are sown in a growing medium in a small plastic pot …. cone-shaped and just over 30mm high and internally just 25mm across internally at the top and with a small lip that holds the 'pot' in its place on the turntable. There is no bottom to the cone …. that's where the roots grow out.

In the pots at the centre of the turntable there are just a few shoots breaking out but as they are turned under lights they move outwards and grow as they go so the finished plants are harvested from the edge. The full growth period is three weeks and the cabinets are planted half a week apart to provide a continual harvest.

Plants taken from the outer rim are put in a waxed brown-paper cone with labelling and set out for sale on shelves across the front of the unit.

At the moment the store is growing Greek basil, Italian basil, coriander and parsley.

The herbs are about as clean as any natural product can be; there are no synthetic pesticides and the system is said to use 95% less water than growing the herbs in a glass house and there should be little or no waste …. both for the store who can judge uptake or for the customer.

The whole system comes from the German company Infarm.

It was launched officially on the 21 November 2019 by the Danish Food Minister Mogens Jensen.

oh ….. and that plug of basil in the last photo …. enough to go with fresh pasta and pine nuts that night and a tomato salad the night after..

This system is new to Denmark - the unit at the Irma store is the first in the country - but should be seen within a much wider story of the Danish approach to public transport, to shopping and to life style.

One noticeable difference here, when I moved to Copenhagen from the UK was not simply the number of people using bikes to get to and from work but that many people appear to do part of the journey by train or metro and part by bike … so either cycle to the nearest station and leave the bike there, going into the centre by public transport, or take the bike on the train to the nearest station to work and then cycle from there to the office or some leave the bike at the city-centre station overnight so it's there when they commute back into the city the next day. Complicated? No just the way it's done. One consequence is that many more Danes seem to do their shopping on the way home at night so it's a bag's worth or enough to fill a bike basket so food for that night and whatever else might be needed.

That has an impact on how food is sold …. fresh food here is generally to be eaten that day or the next so is ready whereas in the UK I tended to buy fruit or vegetables that would ripen later in the week and were to be eaten before the next big shop.

This difference is clearly reflected in the arrangement of the Irma store at Østerport. The station has just been rebuilt and a major new metro station is now up and running alongside the old station for suburban trains so it is clear that Østerport will now be a major interchange for people travelling in and out of the city from the north who will now change here from train to metro rather than going on to Nørreport station or to the central station as before.

Irma is connected directly to the main upper concourse of the station and has been completely remodelled and enlarged so it is in exactly the right place to sell fresh food and fresh Irma-grown herbs to any traveller heading in to work or heading back home.

oh ….. and that plug of basil in the bottom photo …. was enough to go with fresh pasta and pine nuts that night and a tomato salad the night after.

Irma - Østerport

infarm

where do all the tourists go?

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Over the last year or so, I have detected a change of attitude about tourism in the city. 

Tourists and visitors to the city, coming for business or for conferences and events, are still an important source of revenue - many in the city are employed in holiday industries, in the hotels, in restaurants and of course shops rely, to some extent, on tourists shopping - but there have been articles in newspapers recently that have stared to question the benefits of tourism and look at the benefits weighed against the cost. 

Pressures from the numbers of tourists visiting Copenhagen are not yet as marked as the more obvious and better publicised problems in cities like Amsterdam, Barcelona or Venice but certainly people have started to question the impact from Airbnb - particularly where complete apartments are now let through much of the year so this has begun to distort the long-term rental market - and some journalists have asked questions about the number of large cruise ships that stop here and about the impact they have through pollution. But the main criticism is that disproportionate numbers of visitors in the city focus their time on remarkably few sites so crowds of tourists are concentrated in areas like Strøget - the Walking Street - Nyhavn, parts of Christianshavn and along the harbour around the Little Mermaid and these parts of the city can be unpleasantly crowded, not just for local people but actually for visitors as well.

There is also a problem with tour buses that want to drop passengers close to main sites but then park waiting for their passengers to return either blocking the bus stops for public transport or by blocking the front of buildings the visitors actually want to see. Recently, I wanted to take a photograph of the front of the Royal Theatre on Kongens Nytorv for a post here but over three days there were at least two tourist buses parked across the front each time I went past.

 
 

By coincidence, thinking about this post, I came across an article on line by Colin Marshall on the Open Culture site from June of this year. He wrote there about 136 maps of major cities across the world produced for a project called Locals and Tourists and published in a larger project The Geotaggers’ World Atlas, by Eric Fisher who has used MapBox, Twitter and data from Gnip to plot photographs taken of cities that have been uploaded to the internet. 

The central area of the Copenhagen map is reproduced here with red indicating photographs that appear to have been taken by tourists while blue are images that are probably by local people - determined primarily because they are Tweeting from the same location for at least a month - and yellow could be either.

When data is presented in this way, it is easy to see the densely-packed areas where most photographs were taken with Nyhavn - the long rectangle at the centre of the map that extends up to large blob that marks Kongens Nytorv - the large public square at the city end of the New Harbour - and just above that there is the distinct shape of the royal palace with the circle of the main square and long narrow strips running out to the right to the harbour in one direction and to the Marble Church in the other. The large public square in front of city hall and, nearby, Tivoli are the densely-packed but slightly more scattered areas of red on the left side of the city centre.

Roads can be picked out clearly and give a framework for location and one interesting feature of the complete map, right, that shows the wider area around the city, is the long narrow line of yellow that is the railway bridge across to Malmö with good and photogenic views of the sound.

The data was collected in 2013 but more recent published data from 2017 corroborates the general conclusions. In that year, there were around 7 million visitors to the city and more than 60% included Nyhavn in their trip so, by rough calculation, that suggests that the number of visitors walking up and down Nyhavn in a year was equal, approximately, to the total population of the country.

With the opening of a new bridge from the end of Nyhavn for cyclists and pedestrians to cross the harbour to Christianshavn, Nyhavn has become not just a destination but also a major route. Shops close to the harbour on the west side of Nyhavn have seen a marked and welcome increase in business and for several shops it has meant the difference between declining trade and the possibility of a failing business before the bridge opened and surviving now.

But an article in Politiken by Søren Astrup in September 2017 pointed out that, even at that early stage, not long after the bridge opened, there was an obvious problem with the possibility for accidents as tourists, looking at maps or at the view or busy chatting came into contact with fast moving bike traffic. Planners are responsible for road markings and barriers and some changes have been made, particularly at the bottom of the bridge on the city side, but tourists also have a responsibility and have to learn to be more aware.

This is particularly true of the green man system at traffic lights that in too many cities seem to be treated as respect-it-or-ingnore-it advice rather than as an instruction but, because biking is taken seriously here, many cyclists are heading to or from work, can be in a hurry, and many cycle long distances so when you get up momentum (speed) you do not appreciate a tourist sauntering into the bike lane to take a better photo or stepping out onto a crossing because it sounds clear …. ie they can’t hear a car so step out without looking.

The real problem in Nyhavn is people taking photographs and particularly selfies. Most tourists would say well that is pretty harmless and surely it doesn’t hurt locals to wait just a few seconds while they get that perfect shot. 

But I’m much less tolerant of selfies now I have actually moved to an apartment on Nyhavn.

I have deliberately changed my behaviour to walk down the shady side when possible, although I live on the sunny side, simply because there are slightly less people taking photos. It may be your once in a life time shot but for me, heading to the metro, it may well be the ninth or tenth time I’ve had to walk out into the road in just over 100 metres to get around a selfish-selfie taker. 

Do people taking selfies realise just how much space they take up on a narrow or crowded path with or without a selfie stick? 

 
 

A few weeks back I was heading up towards Kongens Nytorv on the Charlottenborg side and walking along the pavement against the water. I noticed a woman standing a short distance ahead with her back against the buildings and only noticed her because of the odd pose - even for someone taking a photo with a phone. The phone was held in both hands at arms length with her arms straight out in front so I guess she was long sighted. As I got nearer and, presumably, as she focused on the phone screen or composed the view, she set off straight across the bike lane - cutting between bikes heading out of the city without looking - and walked straight across the road between the moving cars and straight across the bike lane on the water side with bikes heading fast into the city but without taking her eyes off the screen and ended up, with arms still straight out, rigid, taking up the full width of the pavement immediately in front of me. And I mean immediately in front. Inches away rather than feet away. I was walking quite quickly but she moved at a surprising speed so if I had been wearing rubber-sole shoes there would have been black burn marks on the pavement because I had to stop that quickly to stop from walking straight into her. She gave me a withering look - presumably for standing too close and for distracting her - before turning her head back to the outstretched phone and to the perfect photo she wanted to take. I had to step out into the bike lane - after checking - to get round her. 

When I’m trying to get somewhere it’s bloody annoying although looking out of my apartment it’s more entertaining and a mind-boggling view of weird human behaviour. In the last couple of weeks alone I watched someone who looked like a Japanese tourist who set up his camera on the top of his case with wheels and then made endless trips between the edge of the harbour and his case to take shot after shot after shot until he got just the right angle of his face against the buildings opposite and there was a curious girl who did the splits along the raised timber that marks the edge of the quay for her photo although now, I appreciate, that the timber is, remarkably, like the bar in women’s gymnastics although balancing three metres above the water seemed a little precarious even if, admittedly, it made for an unusual photo. There was also a young couple I took to be Chinese with him in a smart suit and her in an elaborate wedding dress …. Cinderella before midnight meets Marie Antoinette … although they were not strictly taking selfies as they had a photographer with them and she insisted in setting up her camera on a tripod in the middle of the road - again to get what they thought was the perfect photo. 

Another trend I’ve spotted is the fake selfie … the girl (usually a girl and usually mid teens) with a striking outfit and a mate or sometimes someone who is obviously the doting mum there to take the perfect shot. The common pose seems to start by dropping the head forward and then doing a great swinging arc to take all the hair in a great circular sweep so it ends up artfully draped down one side of the face but clear of the eyes and the favourite stance seems to be with body angled to face one side or the other, so across the view line from the camera, but looking slightly over the shoulder towards the camera. Again I’m amazed just how many takes and how much discussion it takes to get that perfect spontaneous shot.

 

Oh and while I’m being grumpy …. the other thing I really really don’t understand is this fad for fixing padlocks to bridges. The first person to do it was being original and presumably romantic if that first lock on that first bridge marked somewhere special where something significant happened … like proposing or promising eternal love and devotion. Now it’s locks on locks on locks.

I’m curious …. do people arrive with pockets full of locks or do they buy them here and exactly how much does it cost the city or the port authority to cut them off at increasingly regular intervals? And what do people do with all those keys?

 

a call to improve life in Copenhagen

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At this time of year, it's not easy to remember that Copenhagen is not just a city of tourists and the shop window for Danish design and architecture but is a large and complex city with a diverse population that has the social problems and the disparities of wealth and all the environmental challenges faced by any city.

With the approach of national elections in Denmark, a recent article in the newspaper Politiken, charged the current government with failing to create the proper framework of a policy for Copenhagen.

This was an opinion piece by three leading politicians from the city council …. Franciska Rosenkilde, Chair of Culture and Leisure; Sisse Marie Welling, Chair of the Health and Care Committee and Karina Vestergaard Madsen, acting Chair of the Technical and Environment Committee.

The government published a report for the capital region in January this year but this article is critical - suggesting that the report failed to address the biggest challenges Copenhagen faces and they make six demands for specific policies to "create a more sustainable Copenhagen with proper welfare."  

 

  1. They want a new government to remove the economic straightjacket with an appeal for an increase in funding for the provision of social services and increases in funding for cultural and recreational facilities.

  2. They suggest road pricing and the establishment of green zones are introduced to tackle rising levels of traffic pollution.

  3. The proportion of social housing should be increased by implementing a target for 25% subsidised housing throughout the city and the government should initiate policies to reduce the number of empty properties in the city calculated to be 3,000 homes

  4. A new government should legalise the use of cannabis. The argument here is that it would tackle a serious problem because gangs control the current cannabis supply that increases crime and, in the worst situations, has seen a rise in the use of guns on the streets that are used to settle disputes or establish control of the trade.

  5. They suggest a reorganisation of employment legislation

  6. They call for moves to "Stop Blackstone" … a foreign equity fund that has invested heavily in the Copenhagen housing market.


 

Politiken 31 May 2019

 

shopping in Jægersborggade

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for some events vehicles are cleared from the street

 
 

In the middle of December The Guardian newspaper published an article that listed ten "cool shopping districts around the world". These were "readers tips" so not exactly a methodical survey but nevertheless interesting. Included in the list was Jægersborggade in Copenhagen.

In the UK there is considerable concern about the decline of high streets or main shopping streets in many towns where an increasing proportion of shops are empty or now used by the charity sector but this does not seem to be as obvious a problem in the major Danish cities … in Copenhagen businesses come and go but there are few abandoned shops.

The success of Jægersborggade as a shopping street suggests clear reasons for the difference between the two countries. Most of the shops are independent but generally, throughout Denmark, there seem to be more small independent companies and local brands so if one fails or moves on to another building then the impact is not as obvious. In the UK, even in small towns there are more national or at least large-scale regional brands so if a retail company fails then that has a wider and obvious impact.

Having lived in Denmark for nearly five years it also appears to me that the pattern of shopping is different. In Copenhagen there is a large shopping area in the centre of the city with three long streets of shops, two of which are pedestrianised, and with department stores and international brands along with Danish companies but there is also a strong tradition in the city of shopping in each area or district … so buying food on the journey to or more probably on the journey back from work but also there is regular use of shops and cafes in the afternoon when parents pick up children from school.

Jægersborggade is very popular at weekends but with a large number of cafes and small restaurants it is also lively in the evening but even during the day it is rarely quiet.

It's said that location is everything.

Jægersborggade is just over 2 kilometres out from the centre of the city … far enough out to have it's own identity and far enough but not too far so it is also a nice destination - a short walk or a short bike ride for a morning or an afternoon.

As in so many cities, in Copenhagen main roads radiate out from the centre. Jægersborggade is between and runs parallel to two of these main roads with Nørrebogade less than 500 metres to the east and Ågade just over 500 metres to the west. This is important in that Jægersborggade is not on a main traffic route but also, although the shops are - how to put this in socially aware Denmark - more middle class and more expensive, this is in part possible because for all the people living in the apartment buildings along the street and nearby, this is not their only shopping street … there is a launderette but apart from that the street can have more expensive and more specialist shops because supermarkets and so on are near on main roads just three or four blocks away.

approaching the street along the main pathway through the cemetery of Assistens Kirkegård

Jægersborggade from the north

typical apartment buildings along the street

select an image to open in slide show

 

More important, Jægersborggade is not actually a through road or a cut through for traffic … at the city end is a main cross street Jagtvej which is a relatively busy section of an inner ring road but Jægersborggade is one way, with traffic only allowed to drive in the direction of the city so there are no cars turning in from the main road and at the end furthest away from the city is a park.

The street is 330 metres long and around 14 metres or about 45 ft wide and with buildings of six storeys along each side it has a distinctly urban feel but it is narrow enough so you can see across to what is happening on the other side and cross backwards and forwards without having to worry too much about moving traffic. Cars parked on both sides is not ideal but the pavements are relatively wide - not far off four metres - so there is space for people to stop and window shop without blocking the path and many of the cafés have seats and tables outside.

This part of the city dates from around 1900 and it is a street of traditional apartment buildings so above each shop there are five or six relatively large and now highly sought-after apartments. Most of these buildings are also of the traditional form with the apartment buildings built with a central doorway from the street leading to a lobby and central staircase with an apartment on each side at each landing. That means that the street has a large number of people actually living here and they come and go through the front doors so the street feels occupied and busy.

It is difficult to be certain without looking through historic plans and photographs but many of the shops appear to have been shops from the start although some of the ground-floor spaces are still bike stores and service rooms for the apartments. All these ground-floor spaces are relatively low and are actually down from the street level so there are two or three steps down into the shops. In many parts of the city there are more steps, sometimes a steep flight of six or seven steps, so there the commercial spaces are half below ground and half above.

This is a distinct Copenhagen form of apartment building and, curiously, that also contributes to its current success as a shopping street. The shop units are narrow - some frontages little more than 4 metres wide with just a doorway from the street and a single narrow window - most just two rooms deep and are relatively low so they are ideal for a small business but not so good for a national or international company that so often has clear prescriptions for size, appearance and arrangement for retail units in their global brands.

 

many of the shops combine what they make or produce with coffee and other food and drink and in some unusual combinations … here beer and vinyl - as in music LPs - and shoes with coffee

The architecture is typical of the period with strong features including heavy rustication of some lower levels, classical style architraves around doors and windows, strong emphasis on windows to staircases and cornices and plat bands. This has been enhanced with strong and bold colours and there is good control and good design for shop signs. Some shops have modern plastic-framed windows and doors but a good number retain original fittings. Developers in 1900 acquired plots so there are various styles along the street and many of the apartment buildings were built in pairs creating an interesting vertical rhythm so the pattern will be shop with apartments above, steps up to door with staircase, shop with apartments, shop with apartments, step up to door with staircase, shop with apartments above.

The street is also interesting because it is not long continuous rows on both sides … on the west side there are a number of short, narrow, pedestrian cross streets running through to the parallel road and on the east side - opposite these cross streets - short open courtyards running back into the block.

With so many apartments and so many sought-after apartments, this is a family-friendly area so not just a street for young, single, affluent professionals to come to from elsewhere in the city but many young families live in the street or in adjoining streets. There are good small local schools and at the end of the street away from the city is Nørrebroparken with superb play equipment so this is a dynamic residential area.

Athe other end of the street to the park, at the city end of the street, and just across Jagtvej, is Assistens Kirkegård, a large and famous city cemetery - Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard are buried here.

Now to English readers it will seem perverse or even downright weird to suggest that a shopping street could be popular and successful because it is close to a cemetery but in Copenhagen cemeteries are well kept and important and very beautiful public spaces with mature trees, grass areas and pathways where people walk and sit on benches and appreciate the trees and the plants and some even look at the memorials. If you walk or even if you are on a bike and come from the city centre then you can come straight up the broad central avenue of the cemetery and at the top are large gates, and then pedestrian crossings to left and right to get over Jagtvej and there, facing you, on the other side is the start of Jægersborggade.

Believe me, it makes for a pleasant afternoon to saunter through the grave yard, walk up and down the street, have a coffee at one of the places with tables outside - to watch the world, or at least a good chunk of Copenhagen life, walk past - or maybe have a beer at the bar of Mikkeller & Friends just round the corner .

 

the play area in Nørrebroparken at the top end of the street

 

select any image to open a larger version in a slide show

 

There are serious points to be made here about planning for shopping in the city.

For a start, as a shopping street, Jægersborggade is certainly very pleasant but it is not unique in Copenhagen. Other streets are different in their layout and their architectural style but are equally good destinations with their own interesting independent craft shops, gift shops, small fashion shops, coffee shops and cafes and restaurants. These would include:

  • what is called the French Quarter around Værnedamsvej, at the city end of Frederiksberg Allé

  • Sønder Boulevard, a wide street beyond the meat market with a central strip of park is a popular destination on a summer afternoon. This part of the city will continue to improve with the opening of new metro stations

  • nearby Istedgade … although it has relatively heavy car traffic, once you get away from the part close to the central station, has good design and second-hand shops and cafés and bars and the end away from the city will change as work on a new metro station at Enghave Plads is completed and the square is replanted

  • Islands Brygge, in streets back from the harbour, has small cafes and craft shops

  • in the north part of the city, the streets and squares in Østebro, east of Trianglen, that again have more and more good bakers and specialist food shops and craft galleries

And there are more. This is not simply saying how wonderful Copenhagen is - although obviously it is - but the point here is that all round the city there are small local shopping streets that are lively and extremely pleasant.

In part that is because the city planners have a policy that no area should drop behind, in terms of public facilities or quality of hard landscaping or public transport. If there was just Jægersborggade it would quickly become swamped by it's own success so the aim has to be to get a well-spread patchwork of traditional shopping with supermarkets and so on and then, nearby, destination streets of specialist shops with places to eat and have coffee.

Of course, there are critics of all this in the city because it is clearly a form of gentrification and older residents in older working-class areas do feel that their housing, because it was cheaper than housing in existing more middle-class districts, is being colonised and some do feel they are being driven out by relatively young families and, ok, relatively affluent and relatively trendy professionals even if it brings life and businesses to the area.

This is what is now by some called placemaking and it is difficult for planners to get the balance right. For a start planners cannot vet who takes on the lease for a shop although there are controls on certain types of use.

These are also changes driven by social factors that cannot be controlled by planners … significant changes to how and when and why people shop. This change in shopping patterns was identified by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore around 20 years ago in an article Welcome to the Experience Economy in the Harvard Business Review where they talked about an evolution from shopping for consumer goods that was changing to people wanting an increasing number of services in shopping areas, from advice to learning and health, and that moving towards a search for 'experiences' so for the high street or shopping area people want opportunities for fitness, entertainment and eating out. They talk about staging experiences that sell and that would certainly be one way of looking at the success of Jægersborggade.

Curiously, as a final thought, shopping centres - of the covered indoor arcade type - further out of the town centre - usually with parking for cars to  draw in people - are still popular and successful in Copenhagen although it is interesting to see that one of the older shopping centres - Fisketorvet - that opened in the south harbour area in 2000 is about to be extensively remodelled. It is of a fairly standard form, inward looking, with a bright and light interior on two levels and with food courts and a cinema but the outside is grim and now very dated in its style so the plan is to build new outward-facing shops around the outside that will integrate the shopping area into a rapidly growing district in the south harbour with many new apartment buildings.