At the end of last week, a new municipal plan for the city was adopted with some significant changes to building regulations.

The regulation for a minimum size of 95 square metres for new homes in Copenhagen will now apply to just 50% of the floor space provided in a development so that 50% of the area can be used for smaller homes.

Homes cannot be smaller than 40 square metres in floor area but the changes in the regulations are also looking at the need for housing for certain groups of single people and for students. The regulations will now allow for student housing with a gross area of 25 to 50 square metres but with an option to divide this between communal areas and private space as small as 13 square metres. The city has identified an urgent need for housing at an acceptable rent to provide new accommodation for 12,000 students in Copenhagen.

There are new recommendations about access to green space so, in future, there should be a minimum distance of 300 metres to walk from a new home to an open green area and that has been defined as a park, a pocket park, planted space or open water of a lake or the harbour. The emphasis appears to be on providing access to green space for some form of recreation and it has been proposed that the long-term ambition should be that no home should be more than 500 metres from a larger green space defined as an area over 2 hectares.

In a draft it was suggested that planning should encourage a one third division for transport so that a third of journeys in the city should be by bicycle, a third of journeys by public transport and no more than a third of journeys by car but this was amended and now reads that the aim should be that no more than 25% of journeys should be by car by 2025 and, in the debate before the vote, the regulations were also amended so there will now be fewer parking spaces in the city with a reduction by 30%.

There were also an interesting but not binding suggestions that developers must be encouraged to use sustainable materials such as timber in the construction and that the city should cut space for private cars on the roads if that releases space for recreation or for public transport or climate change adaptation.