OVERLOOKING THE CITY – COPENHAGEN, AS IT IS PERCIEVED
’Overlooking The City’ is still relevant.
It is 30 years since Copenhagen’s year as European Capital of Culture 1996 helped turn around the fortunes of a city facing economic and cultural crisis. In a recent DR interview, former Culture City Secretary General Trevor Davies looks back at that time – while also looking ahead: According to Davies, Copenhagen has become one of the world’s most attractive cities, but at the same time so exclusive that it comes at the expense of the diversity of urban life. He calls for a new direction with greater emphasis on social sustainability and community, and less on capital and large-scale events.
Helle Juul and Flemming Frost were behind the opening exhibition for Culture City 96, The Overlooked City – Copenhagen Perceived, as well as the book of the same name, which we are sharing here. The book was published in connection with the exhibition at Charlottenborg in 1996.
The Overlooked City was an interdisciplinary project featuring contributions from architects, writers, filmmakers and painters. Contributors included Jens Christian Grøndahl, Juhani Pallasmaa, David Chipperfield, Enric Miralles and many more. The title’s dual meaning remains central to the project: to overlook a city can mean both to survey it from above – and to overlook its unnoticed spaces and pauses.
As Copenhagen today risks becoming more uniform and less open to new actors, ideas and perspectives, there is a need for interdisciplinarity: to seek out the overlooked places, challenge familiar ways of seeing, and make room for other ways of understanding the city. The Overlooked City is still relevant today.